Infinitely many tight contact structures on toroidal manifolds (Q5943654)

The study of contact forms on 3-manifolds divides between `overtwisted' and `tight' structures. The former class is now well-understood, but the latter is more interesting for geometric applications -- both actual and potential. An interesting subclass is the `universally tight' for which tightness lifts to the universal covering manifold. In the present paper the author shows that a manifold containing an incompressible torus \(T\) carries an infinite number of distinct universally tight contact forms. (Here manifold means orientable, irreducible and compact without boundary.) The method is to use the known topological description of toroidal manifolds, pass to a covering space corresponding to the subgroup \(\pi_1T\) of \(\pi_1M^3\), and to use known results for contact forms on these coverings. Although the paper is largely self-contained it is interesting to note that the main theorem follows from an earlier result of the author for `normally embedded' tori \(T\), together with a special argument for manifolds obtained by glueing together Seifert fibrations of a very restricted type.