Controlled constructions of Reeb fields and applications (Q813166)

A contact structure whose Reeb vector field does not have any contractible periodic orbits is called hypertight. By a result of Hofer, Wysocki, and Zehnder, every hypertight contact structure is tight. In the present paper the authors prove the existence of hypertight contact structures, showing that every compact, orientable, irreducible 3-manifold V which is toroidal or has torus boundary components admits a hypertight contact structure, whose Reeb vector field is tangent to the boundary and is transverse to a taut foliation. Such hypertight Reeb vector fields are particularly nice because one can do cylindrical contact homology (instead of the more complicated general theory). The authors apply these ideas to an example of a 3-manifold \(V\) such that the 3-manifold obtained by Dehn filling along the boundary \( \partial V\) is irreducible and different from the 3-sphere.