On the classification of tight contact structures. I (Q1586950)

The author gives a complete classification of tight contact structures on lens spaces, solid tori, and toric annuli (with convex boundary). He also determines which tight contact structures are universally tight and which are virtually overtwisted. (A universally tight contact structure is the one which remains tight when pulled back to its universal cover while a tight contact structure is called virtually overtwisted if it becomes overtwisted when pulled back to a finite cover.) The rough idea of the proof is that we decompose a 3-manifold under consideration along closed convex surfaces or convex surfaces with Legendrian boundary. On a convex surface there is a so-called dividing set. This dividing set encodes the essential information of contact topology in a neighborhood of the surface. We then obtain a factorization into so-called ``basic slices''. This decomposition gives an upper bound of the number of tight contact structures. Moreover, all the candidate tight contact structures can be realized by Legendrian surgery (and distinguished by the relative Euler class).