No Arabic abstract
We survey the interactions between foliations and contact structures in dimension three, with an emphasis on sutured manifolds and invariants of sutured contact manifolds. This paper contains two original results: the fact that a closed orientable irreducible 3-manifold M with nonzero second homol-ogy carries a hypertight contact structure and the fact that an orientable, taut, balanced sutured 3-manifold is not a product if and only if it carries a contact structure with nontrivial cylindrical contact homology. The proof of the second statement uses the Handel-Miller theory of end-periodic diffeomorphisms of end-periodic surfaces.
This paper presents two existence h-principles, the first for conformal symplectic structures on closed manifolds, and the second for leafwise conformal symplectic structures on foliated manifolds with non empty boundary. The latter h-principle allows to linearly deform certain codimension-$1$ foliations to contact structures. These results are essentially applications of the Borman-Eliashberg-Murphy h-principle for overtwisted contact structures and of the Eliashberg-Murphy symplectization of cobordisms, together with tools pertaining to foliated Morse theory, which are elaborated here.
We introduce a notion of positive pair of contact structures on a 3-manifold which generalizes a previous definition of Eliashberg-Thurston and Mitsumatsu. Such a pair gives rise to a locally integrable plane field $lambda$. We prove that if $lambda$ is uniquely integrable and if both structures of the pair are tight, then the integral foliation of $lambda$ doesnt contain any Reeb component whose core curve is homologous to zero. Moreover, the ambient manifold carries a Reebless foliation. We also show a stability theorem `a la Reeb for positive pairs of tight contact structures.
Let V be a closed 3-manifold. In this paper we prove that the homotopy classes of plane fields on V that contain tight contact structures are in finite number and that, if V is atoroidal, the isotopy classes of tight contact structures are also in finite number.
We study naturality properties of the transverse invariant in knot Floer homology under contact (+1)-surgery. This can be used as a calculational tool for the transverse invariant. As a consequence, we show that the Eliashberg-Chekanov twist knots E_n are not transversely simple for n odd and n>3.
We prove Gray--Moser stability theorems for complementary pairs of forms of constant class defining symplectic pairs, contact-symplectic pairs and contact pairs. We also consider the case of contact-symplectic and contact-contact structures, in which the constant class condition on a one-form is replaced by the condition that its kernel hyperplane distribution have constant class in the sense of E. Cartan.