arXiv research

Positive surgery on knots in weakly fillable 3-manifolds yields weakly fillable contact structures.

The paper explores nonexistence and existence of symplectic and Stein fillable contact structures on 3-manifolds.

Study on Legendrian knots and their non-orientable Lagrangian fillings.

The study finds knots with specific surgeries that don't allow weak symplectic fillings.

Study shows patterns in Stein fillability of trefoil surgeries.

This paper explores the relationship between the existence of an exact embedded Lagrangian filling for a Legendrian knot in the standard contact $\rr^3$ and the hierarchy of positive, strongly quasi-positive, and quasi-positive knots. On one hand, results of Eliashberg and especially Boileau and Orevkov show that every…

We characterize which Legendrian $4$-plat knots in the standard contact $3$-space have exact orientable Lagrangian fillings. As a corollary, we show that the underlying smooth knot types of fillable Legendrian $4$-plats are positive.

We prove relative versions of the symplectic capping theorem and sufficiency of Giroux's criterion for Stein fillability and use these to study the 4-genus of knots.

It is known by A. Loi and R. Piergallini that a closed, oriented, smooth 3-manifold is Stein fillable if and only if it has a positive open book decomposition. In the present paper we will show that for every link L in a Stein fillable 3-manifold there exists an additional knot L' to L such that the union of the links …

In this note we make several observations concerning symplectic fillings. In particular we show that a (strongly or weakly) semi-fillable contact structure is fillable and any filling embeds as a symplectic domain in a closed symplectic manifold. We also relate properties of the open book decomposition of a contact man…

This paper completely answers the question of when contact (r)-surgery on a Legendrian knot in the standard contact structure on the 3-sphere yields a symplectically fillable contact manifold for r in (0,1]. We also give obstructions for other positive r and investigate Lagrangian fillings of Legendrian knots.

This note investigates the so-called Tube map which connects welded knots, that is a quotient of the virtual knot theory, to ribbon torus-knots, that is a restricted notion of fillable knotted tori in the 4-sphere. It emphasizes the fact that ribbon torus-knots with a given filling are in one-to-one correspondence with…

Using the relation between Khovanov homology and the Heegaard Floer homology of branched double covers, we show how Khovanov homology can be used to establish tightness of branched double covers of certain transverse knots. We give examples of several infinite families of knots whose branched covers are tight for Khova…

Two of the basic questions in contact topology are which manifolds admit tight contact structures, and on those that do, can we classify such structures. We present the first such classification on an infinite family of (mostly) hyperbolic 3-manifolds: surgeries on the figure-eight knot. We also determine which of the …

New augmentations of twist knots found that can't be filled.

Contact round surgeries on $(\mathbb{S}^3,ξ_{st})$ help in constructing and understanding contact 3-manifolds.

In the symplectization of standard contact $3$-space, $\mathbb R \times \mathbb R^3$, it is known that an orientable Lagrangian cobordism between a Legendrian knot and itself, also known as an orientable Lagrangian endocobordism for the Legendrian knot, must have genus $0$. We show that any Legendrian knot has a non-or…

In this paper, we study strong symplectic fillability and Stein fillability of some tight contact structures on negative parabolic and negative hyperbolic torus bundles over the circle. For the universally tight contact structure with twisting $π$ in $S^1$-direction on a negative parabolic torus bundle, we completely d…

We use the Ozsvath-Szabo contact invariant to produce examples of strongly symplectically fillable contact 3-manifolds which are not Stein fillable.

We give a bordism-theoretic characterisation of those closed almost contact (2q+1)-manifolds (with q > 2) which admit a Stein fillable contact structure. Our method is to apply Eliashberg's h-principle for Stein manifolds in the setting of Kreck's modified surgery. As an application, we show that any simply connected a…

This is a survey on contact open books and contact Dehn surgery. The relation between these two concepts is discussed, and various applications are sketched, e.g. the monodromy of Stein fillable contact 3-manifolds, the Giroux-Goodman proof of Harer's conjecture on fibred links, construction of symplectic caps to filli…

We prove that, like the Seiberg-Witten monopole homology, the Heegaard Floer homology for a three-manifold determines its Thurston norm. As a consequence, we show that knot Floer homology detects the genus of a knot. This leads to new proofs of certain results previously obtained using Seiberg-Witten monopole Floer hom…

Given a contact structure on a closed, oriented three-manifold $Y$, we describe an invariant which takes values in the three-manifold's Floer homology $\HFa$. This invariant vanishes for overtwisted contact structures and is non-zero for Stein fillable ones. The construction uses of Giroux's interpretation of contact s…

Study finds all Brieskorn spheres with at most two fillable contact structures.

By use of a variety of techniques (most based on constructions of quasipositive knots and links, some old and others new), many smooth 3-manifolds are realized as transverse intersections of complex surfaces in complex 3-space with strictly pseudoconvex 5-spheres. These manifolds not only inherit interesting intrinsic …

Study non-fillable curves in a hyperbolic surface with a real line.

New method shows some 3D shapes can't be filled in certain ways.

In this article we provide an infinite family of weakly symplectically fillable contact structures with trivial Ozsvath-Szabo contact invariants over Z/2Z. As a consequence of this fact, we show how Heegaard-Floer theory can distinguish between weakly and strongly fillable contact structures.

For a 4-manifold represented by a framed knot in $S^3$, it has been well known that the 4-manifold admits a Stein structure if the framing is less than the maximal Thurston-Bennequin number of the knot. In this paper, we prove either the converse of this fact is false or there exists a compact contractible oriented smo…

We make some elementary observations concerning subcritically Stein fillable contact structures on 5-manifolds. Specifically, we determine the diffeomorphism type of such contact manifolds in the case the fundamental group is finite cyclic, and we show that on the 5-sphere the standard contact structure is the unique s…

We study weak versus strong symplectic fillability of some tight contact structures on torus bundles over the circle. In particular, we prove that almost all of these tight contact structures are weakly, but not strongly symplectically fillable. For the 3-torus this theorem was established by Eliashberg.

Study confoliations' symplectic fillability, finding obstructions.

Stein fillability of circle bundles over symplectic manifolds is restricted.

On small Seifert fibered spaces $M(e_0;r_1,r_2,r_3)$ with $e_0\neq-1,-2,$ all tight contact structures are Stein fillable. This is not the case for $e_0=-1$ or $-2$. However, for negative twisting structures it is expected that they are all symplectically fillable. Here, we characterize fillable structures among zero-t…

Study embeds ruled surfaces into symplectic manifolds, finds Stein fillability results.

We continue our study of contact structures on manifolds of dimension at least five using complex surgery theory. We show that in each dimension 2q+1 > 3 there are 'maximal' almost contact manifolds to which there is a Stein cobordism from any other (2q+1)-dimensional contact manifold. We show that the product M x S^2 …

We study the fillability (or embeddability) of $CR$ structures under the gauge-fixed Cartan flow. We prove that if the initial $CR$ structure is fillable with nowhere vanishing Tanaka-Webster curvature and free torsion, then it keeps having the same property after a short time. In the Appendix, we show the uniqueness o…

Study on Legendrian and transverse realizations of negative torus knots.

In this paper, we prove that a link which has an almost positive diagram with a certain condition is Lagrangian fillable.

New open books solve a long-standing surface mapping class group question.

Extending our earlier results, we prove that certain tight contact structures on circle bundles over surfaces are not symplectically semi--fillable, thus confirming a conjecture of Ko Honda.

New open books defy positive factorisation in genus one.

We produce the first examples of closed, tight contact 3-manifolds which become overtwisted after performing admissible transverse surgeries. Along the way, we clarify the relationship between admissible transverse surgery and Legendrian surgery. We use this clarification to study a new invariant of transverse knots - …

In this paper, we find infinite hyperbolic 3-manifolds that admit no weakly symplectically fillable contact structures, using tools in Heegaard Floer theory. We also remark that part of these manifolds do admit tight contact structures.

In this short note, we exhibit an infinite family of hyperbolic rational homology $3$--spheres which do not admit any fillable contact structures. We also note that most of these manifolds do admit tight contact structures.

We describe Legendrian surgery diagrams for some horizontal contact structures on non-positive plumbing trees of oriented circle bundles over spheres with negative Euler numbers. As an application we determine Milnor fillable contact structures on some Milnor fillable 3-manifolds.

Recently Francisco Presas Mata constructed the first examples of closed contact manifolds of dimension larger than 3 that contain a plastikstufe, and hence are non-fillable. Using contact surgery on his examples we create on every sphere S^{2n-1}, n>1, an exotic contact structure ξ_- that also contains a plastikstufe. …

Extending work of Chen, we prove the Weinstein conjecture in dimension three for strongly fillable contact structures with either non-vanishing first Chern class or with strong and exact filling having non-trivial canonical bundle. This implies the Weinstein conjecture for certain Stein fillable contact structures obta…