arXiv research

New findings on great circle fibrations and contact structures on odd spheres.

Harmonic and minimal great circle fibrations have special Gauss maps.

We construct an explicit diffeomorphism taking any fibration of a sphere by great circles into the Hopf fibration, using elementary geometry--indeed the diffeomorphism is a local (differential) invariant, algebraic in derivatives.

In a 1983 paper with Frank Warner, we proved that the space of all great circle fibrations of the 3-sphere S^3 deformation retracts to the subspace of Hopf fibrations, and so has the homotopy type of a pair of disjoint two-spheres. Since that time, no generalization of this result to higher dimensions has been found, a…

Given any smooth fibration of the unit 3-sphere by great circles, we show that the distribution of 2-planes orthogonal to the great circle fibres is a tight contact structure, a fact well known in the special case of the Hopf fibrations. The proof expresses hypothesis and conclusion as differential inequalities involvi…

Heinz Hopf's famous fibrations of the 2n+1-sphere by great circles, the 4n+3-sphere by great 3-spheres, and the 15-sphere by great 7-spheres have a number of interesting properties. Besides providing the first examples of homotopically nontrivial maps from one sphere to another sphere of lower dimension, they all share…

The paper extends Gluck and Warner's result on fibrations of spheres by great subspheres.

Contact structures are induced by nondegenerate skew fibrations of R^3.

Given a Hopf fibration of a round sphere by parallel great subspheres, we prove that the projection map to the base space is, up to isometries of domain and range, the unique Lipschitz constant minimizer in its homotopy class. Similarly, given a Hopf fibration of a round sphere by parallel great circles, we view a unit…

A fibration of a Riemannian manifold is fiberwise homogeneous if there are isometries of the manifold onto itself, taking any given fiber to any other one, and preserving fibers. Examples are fibrations of Euclidean n-space by parallel n-planes, and the Hopf fibrations of the round n-sphere by great n-spheres. In this …

A fibration of ${\mathbb R}^n$ by oriented copies of ${\mathbb R}^p$ is called skew if no two fibers intersect nor contain parallel directions. Conditions on $p$ and $n$ for the existence of such a fibration were given by Ovsienko and Tabachnikov. A classification of smooth fibrations of ${\mathbb R}^3$ by skew oriente…

Study of line fibrations in R^3, focusing on non-skew cases.

Synthetic construction of Hopf fibration in 4D space.

Study shows moduli space of fibrations has specific homotopy types.

Study nondegenerate fibrations of Euclidean spaces and their relation to sphere fibrations.

Classifies surfaces with great and small circles through each point.

We investigate great circle links in the three-sphere, the class of links where each component is a great circle. Using the geometry of their complements, we classify such links up to five components. For any two-bridge knot complement, there is a finite cover that is the complement of a link of great circles in $S^3$.…

In this paper, we describe a new surprising example of a fibration of the Clifford torus S3 x S3 in the 7-sphere by great 3-spheres, which is fiberwise homogeneous but whose fibers are not parallel to one another. In particular it is not part of a Hopf fibration. A fibration is fiberwise homogeneous when for any two fi…

In this paper we classify symplectic Lefschetz fibrations (with empty base locus) on a four-manifold which is the product of a three-manifold with a circle. This result provides further evidence in support of the following conjecture regarding symplectic structures on such a four-manifold: if the product of a three-man…

It is shown that analytic conformal submersions of $S^3$ are given by intersections of (not necessary closed) complex surfaces with a quadratic real hyper-surface in $\mathbb{C}P^3.$ A new description of the space of circles in the 3-sphere in terms of a natural bilinear form on the tangent sphere bundle of $S^3$ is gi…

Study stretch laminations in hyperbolic 3-manifolds via circle-valued maps.

There are hyperbolic 3-manifolds that fiber over the circle but that do not admit fibrations by minimal surfaces. Furthermore these manifolds do not admit fibrations by surfaces that are even approximately minimal.

Reciprocity laws for line bundles on circle fibrations over complex manifolds.

We show that all two-bridge knot and link complements are virtually fibered. We also show that spherical Montesinos knot and link complements are virtually fibered. This is accomplished by showing that such knot complements are finitely covered by great circle link complements.

The paper simplifies proofs and characterizes contact structures in 3D.

Study spherical curves with curvature dependent on distance to a great circle.

We consider a closed orientable Riemannian 3-manifold $(M,g)$ and a vector field $X$ with unit norm whose integral curves are geodesics of $g$. Any such vector field determines naturally a 2-plane bundle contained in the kernel of the contact form of the geodesic flow of $g$. We study when this 2-plane bundle remains i…

Uncountably many fibrations found on genus 2 handlebody.

New topological Riemann-Roch theorem for circle fibrations.

New singularities and fibrations in non-orientable 4-manifolds.

We discuss the existence and non-existence of cobordisms between symplectic surface bundles over the circle.

Many important equations of mathematical physics arise geometrically as geodesic equations on Lie groups. In this paper, we study an example of a geodesic equation, the two-component Hunter-Saxton (2HS) system, that displays a number of unique geometric features. We show that 2HS describes the geodesic flow on a manifo…

New collapsing mechanism for G2-manifolds discovered.

New example of hyperbolic 6-manifold with circle-valued Morse function.

Third in a series, this paper constructs non-trivial Cayley fibrations with conical singularities.

We consider circle bundles over compact three-manifolds with symplectic total spaces. We show that the base of such a space must be irreducible or the product of the two-sphere with the circle. We then deduce that such a bundle admits a symplectic form if and only if it admits one that is invariant under the circle act…

Murasugi sums can be defined as readily for Morse maps to the circle of (arbitrary) link complements in the 3-sphere as for fibrations over the circle of (fibered) link complements in the 3-sphere. As one application, I show that if a knot K has free genus m, then there is a Morse map from its complement to the circle …

For the sake of hyperk{ä}hler SYZ conjecture, finding holomorphic Lagrangian fibrations becomes an important issue. Toric hyperk{ä}hler manifolds are real dimension $4n$ non-compact hyperk{ä}hler manifolds which are quaternion analog of toric varieties. The $n$ dimensional residue circle action on it admitting a hyperk…

Consider the cyclic group C_2 of order two acting by complex-conjugation on the unit circle S^1. The main result is that a finitely dominated manifold W of dimension > 4 admits a cocompact, free, discontinuous action by the infinite dihedral group D_\infty if and only if W is the infinite cyclic cover of a free C_2-man…

We study isometric circle actions on 7 dimensional positively curved Eschenburg spaces which are almost free, thus giving rise to orbifold fibrations of these spaces. This shows in particular that every known example of compact manifolds with positive sectional curvature is the total space of an orbifold fibration. We …

This paper investigates certain foliations of three-manifolds that are hybrids of fibrations over the circle with foliated circle bundles over surfaces: a 3-manifold slithers around the circle when its universal cover fibers over the circle so that deck transformations are bundle automorphisms. Examples include hyperbo…

We prove positive mass theorems on ALF manifolds, i.e. complete noncompact manifolds that are asymptotic to a circle fibration over a Euclidean base, with fibers of asymptotically constant length.

We show how to construct broken, achiral Lefschetz fibrations on arbitrary smooth, closed, oriented 4-manifolds. These are generalizations of Lefschetz fibrations over the 2-sphere, where we allow Lefschetz singularities with the non-standard orientation as well as circles of singularities corresponding to round 1-hand…

We consider vector fields on knot/link complements in $S^3$ which are transverse to the fibres of a fibration of the complement over a circle. We prove that a large class of fibred knots/links, including all non-torus fibred 2-bridge knots, has the following property: any vector field transverse to the fibres of the fi…

In this paper we obtain the following results: (1) Any compact Stein surface with boundary embeds naturally into a symplectic Lefschetz fibration over the 2-sphere. (2) There exists a minimal elliptic fibration over the 2-disk, which is not Stein. (3) The circle bundle over a genus n>1 surface with euler number e=-1 ad…

Holomorphic forms found on 3D spaces without zeros.

We list all analytic diffeomorphisms between an open subset of the 4-dimensional projective space and an open subset of the 4-dimensional sphere that take all line segments to arcs of round circles. These are the following: restrictions of the quaternionic Hopf fibrations and projections from a hyperplane to a sphere f…

Study investigates lattices fibring over the circle, focusing on BNSR invariants.