Recently, there have been several breakthroughs in the classification of tight contact structures. We give an outline on how to exploit methods developed by Ko Honda and John Etnyre to obtain classification results for specific examples of small Seifert manifolds.
In this note, we exhibit infinite families of tight non-fillable contact manifolds supported by planar open books with vanishing Heegaard Floer contact invariants. Moreover, we also exhibit an infinite such family where the supported manifold is hyperbolic.
For some geometries including symplectic and contact structures on an n-dimensional manifold, we introduce a two-step approach to Gromovs h-principle. From formal geometric data, the first step builds a transversely geometric Haefliger structure of codimension n. This step works on all manifolds, even closed. The second step, which works only on open manifolds and for all geometries, regularizes the intermediate Haefliger structure and produces a genuine geometric structure. Both steps admit relative parametri
Periodic surface homemorphisms (diffeomorphisms) play a significant role in the the Nielsen-Thurston classification of surface homeomorphisms. Periodic surface homeomorphisms can be described (up to conjugacy) by using data sets which are combinatorial objects. In this article, we start by associating a rational open book to a slight modification of a given data set, called marked data set. It is known that every rational open book supports a contact structure. Thus, we can associate a contact structure to a periodic map and study the properties of it in terms combinatorial conditions on marked data sets. In particular, we prove that a class of data sets, satisfying easy-to-check combinatorial hypothesis, gives rise to Stein fillable contact structures. In addition to the above, we prove an analogue of Moris construction of explicit symplectic filling for rational open books. We also prove a sufficient condition for Stein fillability of rational open books analogous to the positivity of monodromy in honest open books as in the result of Giroux and Loi-Piergallini.
A smooth fibration of $mathbb{R}^3$ by oriented lines is given by a smooth unit vector field $V$ on $mathbb{R}^3$, for which all of the integral curves are oriented lines. Such a fibration is called skew if no two fibers are parallel, and it is called nondegenerate if $ abla V$ vanishes only in the direction of $V$. Nondegeneracy is a form of local skewness, though in fact any nondegenerate fibration is globally skew. Nondegenerate and skew fibrations have each been recently studied, from both geometric and topological perspectives, in part due to their close relationship with great circle fibrations of $S^3$. Any fibration of $mathbb{R}^3$ by oriented lines induces a plane field on $mathbb{R}^3$, obtained by taking the orthogonal plane to the unique line through each point. We show that the plane field induced by any nondegenerate fibration is a tight contact structure. For contactness we require a new characterization of nondegenerate fibrations, whereas the proof of tightness employs a recent result of Etnyre, Komendarczyk, and Massot on tightness in contact metric 3-manifolds. We conclude with some examples which highlight relationships among great circle fibrations, nondegenerate fibrations, skew fibrations, and the contact structures associated to fibrations.
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.