Ozsváth-Szabó invariants and tight contact three-manifolds; I (Q1882837)

The authors show that the contact Ozsváth-Szabó invariants can be used to distinguish tightness from symplectic fillability for a contact structure. Let \(S^{3}_{r}(K)\) denote the oriented \(3\)-manifold obtained by rational \(r\)-surgery on a knot \(K\) in \(S^3\). For some \(r\)'s and \(K\)'s, the authors prove that \(S^{3}_{r}(K)\) carries positive, tight contact structures. The examples include the Brieskorn spheres \(-\Sigma (2,3,3)\) and \(-\Sigma (2,3,4)\). Also for each positive integer \(m\), the authors prove that there is a Seifert fibered rational homology sphere carrying at least \(m\) pairwise nonisomorphic tight, but not symplectically fillable contact structures. The paper shows that we can combine contact Ozsváth-Szabó invariants with contact surgery to deal with the existence problem of tight contact structures on a 3-manifold in the absence of suitable incompressible surfaces.