arXiv research

We introduce the notion of a nested open book, a submanifold equipped with an open book structure compatible with an ambient open book, and describe in detail the special case of a push-off of the binding of an open book. This enables us to explicitly describe a natural open book decomposition of a fibre connected sum …

The abstract discusses embedding manifolds in open books and contact structures.

Common positive stabilisation found for isotopic contact structures.

A real 3-manifold is a smooth 3-manifold together with an orientation preserving smooth involution, called a real structure. In this article we study open book decompositions on smooth real 3-manifolds that are compatible with the real structure. We call them real open book decompositions. We show that each real open b…

In this note we define three invariants of contact structures in terms of open books supporting the contact structures. These invariants are the support genus (which is the minimal genus of a page of a supporting open book for the contact structure), the binding number (which is the minimal number of binding components…

We describe explicit open books on arbitrary plumbings of oriented circle bundles over closed oriented surfaces. We show that, for a non-positive plumbing, the open book we construct is horizontal and the corresponding compatible contact structure is also horizontal and Stein fillable. In particular, we describe horizo…

Handles decompositions reveal new open book structures.

New open books defy positive factorisation in genus one.

In the present paper we describe compatible open books for the fibre connected sum along binding components of open books, as well as for the fibre connected sum along multi-sections of open books. As an application the first description provides simple ways of constructing open books supporting all tight contact struc…

As an application of the construction of open books on plumbed 3-manifolds, we construct elliptic open books on torus bundles over the circle. In certain cases these open books are compatible with Stein fillable contact structures and have minimal genus.

Giroux has described a correspondence between open book decompositions on a 3--manifold and contact structures. In this paper we use Heegaard Floer homology to give restrictions on contact structures which correspond to open book decompositions with planar pages, generalizing a recent result of Etnyre.

Using open book foliations we show that an overtwisted disc in a planar open book can be put in a topologically nice position. As a corollary, we prove that a planar open book whose fractional Dehn twist coefficients grater than one for all the boundary components supports a tight contact structure.

The study connects periodic surface homeomorphisms to contact structures using rational open books.

We describe explicit horizontal open books on some Seifert fibered 3--manifolds. We show that the contact structures compatible with these horizontal open books are Stein fillable and horizontal as well. Moreover we draw surgery diagrams for some of these contact structures.

The first author in recent work with D. Gay developed the notion of a Morse structure on an open book as a tool for studying closed contact 3-manifolds. We extend the notion of Morse structure to extendable partial open books in order to study contact 3-manifolds with convex boundary.

Detects right-veering properties in open books using combinatorial methods.

We construct, somewhat non-standard, Legendrian surgery diagrams for some Stein fillable contact structures on some plumbing trees of circle bundles over spheres. We then show how to put such a surgery diagram on the pages of an open book for $S^3,$ with relatively low genus. Thus we produce open books with low genus p…

We study open books (or open book decompositions) of a closed oriented 3-manifold which support overtwisted contact structures. We focus on a simple closed curve along which one can perform Stallings twist, called ``twisting loop''. We show that the existence of a twisting loop on the fiber surface of an open book is e…

Proves codimension 2 spun embedding for specific manifolds.

In this note we introduce the (homologically essential) arc complex of a surface as a tool for studying properties of open book decompositions and contact structures. After characterizing destabilizability in terms of the essential translation distance of the monodromy of an open book we given an application of this re…

If (S,h) is an open book with disconnected binding then we can form a new open book (S',h') by capping off one of the boundary components of S with a disk. We define a U-equivariant map on Heegaard Floer homology which sends c^+(S',h') to c^+(S,h), and we discuss various applications. In particular, we determine the su…

We study fillings of contact structures supported by planar open books by analyzing positive factorizations of their monodromy. Our method is based on Wendl's theorem on symplectic fillings of planar open books. We prove that every virtually overtwisted contact structure on L(p,1) has a unique filling, and describe fil…

We study an explicit construction of planar open books with four binding components on any three-manifold which is given by integral surgery on three component pure braid closures. This construction is general, indeed any planar open book with four binding components is given this way. Using this construction and resul…

New proof of Giroux Correspondence for tight contact 3-manifolds.

We give an alternative proof of a theorem of Honda-Kazez-Matić that every non-right-veering open book supports an overtwisted contact structure. We also study two types of examples that show how overtwisted discs are embedded relative to right-veering open books.

In this paper we discuss the change in contact structures as their supporting open book decompositions have their binding components cabled. To facilitate this and applications we define the notion of a rational open book decomposition that generalizes the standard notion of open book decomposition and allows one to mo…

New theorem allows transverse links to be braided with rational book structure.

The study examines Morse diagrams and their behavior under Murasugi sums, leading to contact structure classifications.

We study open books on three manifolds which are compatible with an overtwisted contact structure. We show that the existence of certain arcs, called sobering arcs, is a sufficient condition for an open book to be overtwisted, and is necessary up to stabilization by positive Hopf-bands. Using these techniques we prove …

In this note, we define a new invariant of a Legendrian knot in a contact manifold using an open book decomposition supporting the contact structure. We define the support genus sg(L) of a Legendrian knot L in a contact 3-manifold (M, ξ) as the minimal genus of a page of an open book of M supporting the contact structu…

In this paper we write explicitly the open book decompositions of links of quotient surface singularities supporting the corresponding unique Milnor fillable contact structure. The page-genus of these Milnor open books are minimal among all Milnor open books supporting the same contact structure. We also investigate wh…

In this note we observe that while all overtwisted contact structures on compact 3--manifolds are supported by planar open book decompositions, not all contact structures are. This has relevance to invariants of contact structures and also to the Weinstein conjecture via work of Abbas Cieliebak and Hofer.

We determine parts of the contact homology of certain contact 3-manifolds in the framework of open book decompositions, due to Giroux. We study two cases: when the monodromy map of the compatible open book is periodic and when it is pseudo-Anosov. For an open book with periodic monodromy, we verify the Weinstein conjec…

In this paper, we introduce the notions of an iterated planar Lefschetz fibration and an iterated planar open book decomposition and prove the Weinstein conjecture for contact manifolds supporting an open book that has iterated planar pages. For $n\geq 1$, we show that a $(2n+1)$-dimensional contact manifold $M$ suppor…

In this paper, we study compact convex Lefschetz fibrations on compact convex symplectic manifolds (i.e., Liouville domains) of dimension $2n+2$ which are introduced by Seidel and later also studied by McLean. By a result of Akbulut-Arikan, the open book on $\partial W$, which we call \emph{convex open book}, induced b…

We show that if a contact open book $(Σ,h)$ on a $(2n+1)$-manifold $M$ ($n\geq1$) is induced by a Lefschetz fibration $π:W \to D^2$, then there is a one-to-one correspondence between positive stabilizations of $(Σ,h)$ and \emph{positive stabilizations} of $π$. More precisely, any positive stabilization of $(Σ,h)$ is in…

Let $T$ denote a binding component of an open book $(Σ, φ)$ compatible with a closed contact 3-manifold $(M, ξ)$. We describe an explicit open book $(Σ', φ')$ compatible with $(M, ζ)$, where $ζ$ is the contact structure obtained from $ξ$ by performing a full Lutz twist along $T$. Here, $(Σ', φ')$ is obtained from $(Σ, …

Introduction to contact invariant in bordered Floer homology.

By recent results of Baker--Etnyre--Van Horn-Morris, a rational open book decomposition defines a compatible contact structure. We show that the Heegaard Floer contact invariant of such a contact structure can be computed in terms of the knot Floer homology of its (rationally null-homologous) binding. We then use this …

We construct an open book decomposition compatible with a contact structure given by a rational contact surgery on a Legendrian link in the standard contact $S^3$. As an application we show that some rational contact surgeries on certain Legendrian knots induce overtwisted contact structures.

We introduce an essential open book foliation, a refinement of the open book foliation, and develop technical estimates of the fractional Dehn twist coefficient (FDTC) of monodromies and the FDTC for closed braids, which we introduce as well. As applications, we quantitatively study the `gap' of overtwisted contact str…

We consider singular foliations of codimension one on 3-manifolds, in the sense defined by A. Haefliger as being Gamma_1-structures. We prove that under the obvious linear embedding condition, they are Gamma_1-homotopic to a regular foliation carried by an open book or a twisted open book. The latter concept is introdu…

The aim of this paper is to give an alternative proof of a theorem about the existence of contact structures on five-manifolds due to Geiges. This theorem asserts that simply-connected five-manifolds admit a contact structure in every homotopy class of almost contact structures. Our proof uses the open book constructio…

A spinal open book decomposition on a contact manifold is a generalization of a supporting open book which exists naturally e.g. on the boundary of a symplectic filling with a Lefschetz fibration over any compact oriented surface with boundary. In this first paper of a two-part series, we introduce the basic notions re…

A real 3- or 4-manifold has by definition an orientation preserving smooth involution acting on it. We consider Lefschetz fibrations of 4-dimensional manifolds-with-boundary and open book decompositions on their boundary in the existence of a real structure. We prove that there is a real open book which cannot be fille…

We define the reduced Khovanov homology of an open book (S,h), and we identify a distinguished "contact element" in this group which may be used to establish the tightness or non-fillability of contact structures compatible with (S,h). Our construction generalizes the relationship between the reduced Khovanov homology …

Introduces a new CR invariant for co-oriented contact structures on closed 3-manifolds

New invariant distinguishes tight contact structures on 3-tori.