Ozsváth-Szabó invariants and tight contact three-manifolds. II (Q861784)

In a previous paper [Geom. Topol. 8, 925--945 (2004; Zbl 1059.57017)], the present authors used the Ozsváth-Szabó invariants to study the existence of tight contact structures on the oriented 3-manifold \(S^{3}_{r}(K)\) obtained by performing rational \(r\)-surgery along a knot \(K \subset S^{3}\). In particular, they proved that if \(T_{p,q}\) is the positive \((p,q)\) torus knot, then \(S^{3}_{r}(T_{p,q})\) carries positive, tight contact structures for \(r \neq pq-p-q\). Here, the authors study the problem concerning the existence of positive, tight contact structures on the oriented 3-manifolds \(E_{p,n}=S^{3}_{p^{2}n-pn-1}(T_{p,pn+1})\), obtained by performing \(p^{2}n-pn-1\) surgery on a positive torus knot of type \((p,pn+1)\), \(p,n \in \mathbb N\) and \(p>1\). It is proved that \(E_{2,n}\) does not carry tight contact structures for any \(n\), while \(E_{p,n}\) carries tight contact structures for any \(n\) and any odd \(p\). An infinite family of closed, oriented, irreducible 3-manifolds, which do not carry tight contact structures is presented. Nonexistence results via standard methods of contact topology and existence results by using a delicate computation of contact Ozsváth-Szabó invariants are also obtained.