Constructions in Sasakian geometry

We first generalize the join construction described previously by the first two authors [4] for quasi-regular Sasakian-Einstein orbifolds to the general quasi-regular Sasakian case. This allows for the further construction of specific types of Sasakian structures that are preserved under the join operation, such as positive, negative, or null Sasakian structures, as well as Sasakian-Einstein structures. In particular, we show that there are families of Sasakian-Einstein structures on certain 7-manifolds homeomorphic to S ² × S ⁵. We next show how the join construction emerges as a special case of Lerman’s contact fibre bundle construction [32]. In particular, when both the base and the fiber of the contact fiber bundle are toric we show that the construction yields a new toric Sasakian manifold. Finally, we study toric Sasakian manifolds in dimension 5 and show that any simply-connected compact oriented 5-manifold with vanishing torsion admits regular toric Sasakian structures. This is accomplished by explicitly constructing circle bundles over the equivariant blow-ups of Hirzebruch surfaces. During the preparation of this work the first two authors were partially supported by NSF grants DMS-0203219 and DMS-0504367.