Classification of tight contact structures on surgeries on the figure-eight knot (Q2004531)

An important problem in contact topology is that of understanding which smooth manifolds admit tight contact structures and, for those manifolds which do admit them, classify such structures up to isotopy and/or contactomorphism. In the \(3\)-dimensional setting, the work [\textit{V. Colin}, C. R. Acad. Sci., Paris, Sér. I 324, No. 6, 659--663 (1997; Zbl 0876.57051)] reduces the study of this problem to the setting of prime manifolds. Many authors have then obtained several existence and classification results on prime \(3\)-manifolds, mostly relying on the use of the convex surface techniques developed in [\textit{E. Giroux}, Invent. Math. 141, No. 3, 615--689 (2000; Zbl 1186.53097)] and [\textit{K. Honda}, Geom. Topol. 4, 309--368 (2000; Zbl 0980.57010)]. The hyperbolic case has been however harder to deal with, mainly due to the fact that there isn't a complete understanding of tight contact structures on thickenings of high genus surfaces and on high genus handlebodies. The paper under review continues dealing with this problem, and is the first to give a complete classification result for tight contact structures in the \textit{hyperbolic} \(3\)-dimensional setting. More precisely, the authors classify, up to isotopy, tight contact structures on all hyperbolic \(3\)-manifolds obtained from (smooth) Dehn surgery with slope \(r\) on the figure-eight knot, for \(r\) in the intervals \((-\infty,-4)\), \([-3,0)\), \([1,4)\) and \([5,\infty)\). The number of said isotopy classes is moreover given by an explicit formula in terms of the negative continued fraction of \(-\frac{1}{r}\). The proof consists in two different steps. First, an upper bound on the number of possible tight contact structures is given. For this, the authors use convex surface decompositions to break up the manifold into simpler pieces consisting of contact (\(0\)-codimensional) submanifolds with convex boundary, and then use the classification results for tight contact structures on these simpler pieces from the above cited paper by K. Honda. In the second step, as many tight structures as given by the upper bound are realized via contact surgery on Legendrian figure-eight knots in the \(3\)-sphere equipped with either the standard tight contact structure or an overtwisted one. Here, the authors distinguish these contact structures by looking at their contact class in Heegard Floer homology. It is worth mentioning that the first step deeply relies on the fact that the figure-eight knot is a genus-\(1\) fibered knot with pseudo-Anosov monodromy. In particular, the authors point out that the approach developed in the paper under review can be applied to a more general setting, provided some ``complicated combinatorics'' is taken care of. Lastly, the authors also study fillability and universal tightness of these structures. More precisely, all the contact structures that they have classified are strongly symplectically fillable (and, in fact, even Stein fillable for \(r\geq -9\)), and, depending on the value of \(r\), there are \(1\), \(2\) or \(4\) universally tight contact structures among them.