Every real 3-manifold is real contact (Q6042875)

The authors re-prove several classical results from 3-dimensional contact topology in the category of real contact manifolds. A real contact 3-manifold is a closed manifold together with an orientation-preserving involution \(c_M\) such that the fixed point set of \(c_M\) is either empty or 1-dimensional, and a real contact structure, i.e., a contact structure such that \begin{itemize} \item \(c_M\) preserves the contact structure, \item \(dc_M\) reverses the co-orientation of the contact structure. \end{itemize} The main result of the paper states that every real 3-manifold admits a real contact structure. The most important tools developed in this paper to prove this result are a \(c_M\)-equivariant version of contact Dehn-surgery and a Lickorish-Wallace theorem for real manifolds, stating that any closed orientable real 3-manifold can be obtained via equivariant Dehn-surgery along a certain link in the standard real \(S^3\). As an application it is shown that the tight contact structures on \(S^2\times S^1\) and on certain lens spaces are real.