Contact structures induced by skew fibrations of R^3

DOI10.1112/BLMS.12284MaRDI QIDQ5205449zbMATH OpenOpenAlexFDO

Authors Michael Harrison

Publication date 11 December 2019

Published in Bulletin of the London Mathematical Society (Search for Journal in Brave)

Full work available at URL https://arxiv.org/abs/1904.00405

zbMATH Keywords

contact structuresgreat circle fibrationHopf's fibrationskew fibrationtight, overtwisted contact structures

Mathematics Subject Classification ID

(G)-structures (53C10) Foliations (differential geometric aspects) (53C12) Symplectic and contact topology in high or arbitrary dimension (57R17) Topology of vector bundles and fiber bundles (57R22)

Abstract: A smooth fibration of $mathbb{R}^3$ by oriented lines is given by a smooth unit vector field $V$ on $mathbb{R}^3$, for which all of the integral curves are oriented lines. Such a fibration is called skew if no two fibers are parallel, and it is called nondegenerate if $ablaV$ vanishes only in the direction of $V$. Nondegeneracy is a form of local skewness, though in fact any nondegenerate fibration is globally skew. Nondegenerate and skew fibrations have each been recently studied, from both geometric and topological perspectives, in part due to their close relationship with great circle fibrations of $S^3$. Any fibration of $mathbb{R}^3$ by oriented lines induces a plane field on $mathbb{R}^3$, obtained by taking the orthogonal plane to the unique line through each point. We show that the plane field induced by any nondegenerate fibration is a tight contact structure. For contactness we require a new characterization of nondegenerate fibrations, whereas the proof of tightness employs a recent result of Etnyre, Komendarczyk, and Massot on tightness in contact metric 3-manifolds. We conclude with some examples which highlight relationships among great circle fibrations, nondegenerate fibrations, skew fibrations, and the contact structures associated to fibrations.

Recommendations

• Fibrations of \(\mathbb{R}^3\) by oriented lines
• Skew flat fibrations
• The contact structure induced by a line fibration of \(\mathbb{R}^3\) is standard
• Fibrations and contact structures
• Global smooth fibrations of ℝ³ by oriented lines

Cites work

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Cited in

(13)

• Fibrations of \(\mathbb{R}^3\) by oriented lines
• Great circle fibrations and contact structures on the 3-sphere
• Global smooth fibrations of ℝ³ by oriented lines
• The contact structure induced by a line fibration of \(\mathbb{R}^3\) is standard
• Spaces of embeddings: nonsingular bilinear maps, chirality, and their generalizations
• Coupled embeddability
• Great circle fibrations and contact structures on odd-dimensional spheres
• Skew and sphere fibrations
• Geodesic and conformally Reeb vector fields on flat 3-manifolds
• Tangent ray foliations and their associated outer billiards
• Outer billiards in the spaces of oriented geodesics of the three-dimensional space forms
• Geodesic vector fields, induced contact structures and tightness in dimension three
• Skew flat fibrations

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