A cut-and-paste approach to contact topology

MaRDI QIDQ2493394zbMATH OpenFDO

Authors William H. Kazez

Publication date 12 June 2006

Published in Boletín de la Sociedad Matemática Mexicana. Third Series (Search for Journal in Brave)

Full work available at URL https://arxiv.org/abs/math/0210091

zbMATH Keywords

atoroidalcontact structureconvex decompositionHaken manifoldlaminationtaut foliationtight

Mathematics Subject Classification ID

General geometric structures on manifolds (almost complex, almost product structures, etc.) (53C15) General geometric structures on low-dimensional manifolds (57M50) Symplectic and contact topology in high or arbitrary dimension (57R17)

Abstract: Contact structures on 3-manifolds are analyzed by decomposing the manifold along convex surfaces. Background results of Giroux, Eliashberg, Colin, and Honda are discussed with an emphasis on examples. Convex decompositions are then used to give a new proof of the Gabai-Eliashberg-Thurston Theorem on the existence of universally tight contact structures and also to study the contact topology of a space in the presence or absence of tori. Classification of tight contact structures on fibred manifolds and related open questions are also discussed. This paper is based on a series of talks given at the Tokyo Institute of Technology from Jun 3-7, 2002.

Review text

This paper is an exposition of cut and paste techniques in contact topology that are similar to the Haken decomposition and the Gabai saturated manifold decomposition. Convex decompositions and tight contact structures on atoroidal and Haken manifolds are discussed in detail. Here are some important results discussed in the paper. Let \((M,\gamma)\) be a suturated irreducible manifold with annular sutures, and let \((M, \Gamma)\) be the corresponding convex structure. Then the following statements are equivalent: \((M, \Gamma)\) carries a tight contact structure iff \((M, \Gamma)\) carries a universally tight contact structure iff \((M, \gamma)\) carries a taut foliation iff \((M, \gamma)\) has a suturated manifold decomposition iff \((M,\gamma)\) is taut. (These equivalences were proved in the works of Eliashberg, Gabai and Thurston.) An irreducible manifold \(M\) carries finitely many tight (or universally tight) contact structures if and only if it is atoroidal. (The if direction was proved by Colin, Giroux and Honda. The only if direction was proved by Colin and by Honda, Kazez and Matic.) The author gives a classification (due to Honda, Kazez and Matic) of tight non product contact structures on the product \(\Sigma\times I\) of an interval and a closed surface of genus \(\geq 2\) such that the dividing curves on each component of \(\partial (\Sigma \times I)\) are a pair of nonseparating parallel curves. He uses this classification to prove the Gabai-Eliashberg-Thurston Theorem saying that a Haken manifold \(M\) with \(H_2(M)\neq0\) carries a universally tight contact structure. In the last section the author discusses some open questions and possible relations with the theory of laminations.

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Cited in

(6)

• Tight contact structures and taut foliations
• A class of tight contact structures on \(\Sigma_2 \times I\)
• Convex decomposition theory
• Szeged-Like Topological Indices and the Efficacy of the Cut Method: The Case of Melem Structures
• Chord diagrams, contact-topological quantum field theory and contact categories
• Heegaard splittings and the tight Giroux correspondence

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