Tight contact structures and taut foliations (Q1583636)

Eliashberg and Thurston showed that if a 3-manifold carries a taut foliation then it supports a tight contact structure. This paper establishes the converse, for bounded 3-manifolds. (As \(S^3\) supports a tight contact structure but carries no taut foliation, the converse cannot be extended to all closed 3-manifolds.) The argument rests on finding a Haken hierarchy in which the splitting surfaces are convex. Such convex Haken decompositions are analogous to the sutured manifold decompositions of \textit{D. Gabai} [J. Differ. Geom. 18, 445-503 (1983; Zbl 0533.57013)]. The authors introduce the notion of convex structure, and in their main result (Theorem 6.1) they give four equivalent conditions relating tautness for an irreducible sutured manifold to the existence of tight contact structures on the associated convex structure.