An Ozsváth–Szabó Floer homology invariant of knots in a contact manifold

Using the knot Floer homology filtration, we define invariants associated to a knot in a three-manifold possessing non-vanishing Floer co(homology) classes. In the case of the Ozsváth–Szabó contact invariant we obtain an invariant of knots in a contact three-manifold. This invariant provides an upper bound for the Thurston–Bennequin plus rotation number of any Legendrian realization of the knot. We use it to demonstrate the first systematic construction of prime knots in contact manifolds other than S³ with negative maximal Thurston–Bennequin invariant. Perhaps more interesting, our invariant provides a criterion for an open book to induce a tight contact structure. A corollary is that if a manifold possesses contact structures with distinct non-vanishing Ozsváth–Szabó invariants, then any fibered knot can realize the classical Eliashberg–Bennequin bound in at most one of these contact structures.     

On the Heegaard genus of contact 3-manifolds

It is well-known that the Heegaard genus is additive under connected sum of 3-manifolds. We show that the Heegaard genus of contact 3-manifolds is not necessarily additive under contact connected sum. We also prove some basic properties of the contact genus (a.k.a. open book genus [Rubinstein J.H., Comparing open book and Heegaard decompositions of 3-manifolds, Turkish J. Math., 2003, 27(1), 189–196]) of 3-manifolds, and compute this invariant for some 3-manifolds.     

Tight contact structures on solid tori

In this paper we study properties of tight contact structures on solid tori. In particular we discuss ways of distinguishing two solid tori with tight contact structures. We also give examples of unusual tight contact structures on solid tori.

We prove the existence of a -valued and a -valued invariant of a closed solid torus. We call them the self-linking number and the rotation number respectively. We then extend these definitions to the case of an open solid torus. We show that these invariants exhibit certain monotonicity properties with respect to inclusion. We also prove a number of results which give sufficient conditions for two solid tori to be contactomorphic.

At the same time we discuss various ways of constructing a tight contact structure on a solid torus. We then produce examples of solid tori with tight contact structures and calculate self-linking and rotation numbers for these tori. These examples show that the invariants we defined do not give a complete classification of tight contact structure on open solid tori.

At the end, we construct a family of tight contact structure on a solid torus such that the induced contact structure on a finite-sheeted cover of that solid torus is no longer tight. This answers negatively a question asked by Eliashberg in 1990. We also give an example of tight contact structure on an open solid torus which cannot be contactly embedded into a sphere with the standard contact structure, another example of unexpected behavior.

     

Khovanov homology, open books, and tight contact structures

We define the reduced Khovanov homology of an open book (S,?), and identify a distinguished “contact element” in this group which may be used to establish the tightness or non-fillability of contact structures compatible with (S,?). Our construction generalizes the relationship between the reduced Khovanov homology of a link and the Heegaard Floer homology of its branched double cover. As an application, we give combinatorial proofs of tightness for several contact structures which are not Stein-fillable. Lastly, we investigate a comultiplication structure on the reduced Khovanov homology of an open book which parallels the comultiplication on Heegaard Floer homology defined in Baldwin (2008) [4].     

Elliptic open books on torus bundles over the circle

As an application of the construction of open books on plumbed 3-manifolds, we construct elliptic open books on torus bundles over the circle. In certain cases these open books are compatible with Stein fillable contact structures and have minimal genus.      

Contact open books with exotic pages

We consider a fixed contact 3-manifold that admits infinitely many compact Stein fillings which are all homeomorphic but pairwise non-diffeomorphic. Each of these fillings gives rise to a closed contact 5-manifold described as a contact open book whose page is the filling at hand and whose monodromy is the identity symplectomorphism. We show that the resulting infinitely many contact 5-manifolds are all diffeomorphic but pairwise non-contactomorphic. Moreover, we explicitly determine these contact 5-manifolds.     

Infinitesimal Torelli theorem for surfaces of general type with certain invariants

We prove the infinitesimal Torelli theorem for general minimal complex surfaces X's with the first Chern number 3, geometric genus 1, and irregularity 0 which have non-trivial 3-torsion divisors. We also show that the coarse moduli space for surfaces with the invariants as above is a 14-dimensional unirational variety.     

Brieskorn manifolds as contact branched covers of spheres

We show that Brieskorn manifolds with their standard contact structures are contact branched coverings of spheres. This covering maps a contact open book decomposition of the Brieskorn manifold onto a Milnor open book of the sphere.      

The book thickness of a graph

The book thickness bt(G) of a graph G is defined, its basic properties are delineated, and relations are given with other invariants such as thickness, genus, and chromatic number. A graph G has book thickness bt(G) ≤ 2 if and only if it is a subgraph of a hamiltonian planar graph, but we conjecture that there are planar graphs with arbitrarily high book thickness.     

Closed minimal surfaces in cusped hyperbolic three-manifolds

We introduce essential open book foliations by refining open book foliations, and develop technical estimates of the fractional Dehn twist coefficient (FDTC) of monodromies and the FDTC for closed braids, which we introduce as well. As applications, we quantitatively study the ‘gap’ between overtwisted contact structures and non-right-veering monodromies. We give sufficient conditions for a 3-manifold to be irreducible and atoroidal. We also show that the geometries of a 3-manifold and the complement of a closed braid are determined by the Nielsen–Thurston types of the monodromies of their open book decompositions.     

Computing the Thurston–Bennequin invariant in open books

We give explicit formulas and algorithms for the computation of the Thurston–Bennequin invariant of a nullhomologous Legendrian knot on a page of a contact open book and on Heegaard surfaces in convex position. Furthermore, we extend the results to rationally nullhomologous knots in arbitrary 3-manifolds.     

Open book decompositions for contact structures on Brieskorn manifolds

In this paper, we give an open book decomposition for the contact structures on some Brieskorn manifolds, in particular for the contact structures of Ustilovsky. The decomposition uses right-handed Dehn twists as conjectured by Giroux.

     

Full Lutz twist along the binding of an open book

Let T denote a binding component of an open book (S, f){(\Sigma, \phi)} compatible with a closed contact 3-manifold (M, ξ). We describe an explicit open book (S￠, f￠){(\Sigma', \phi')} compatible with (M, ζ), where ζ is the contact structure obtained from ξ by performing a full Lutz twist along T. Here, (S￠, f￠){(\Sigma', \phi')} is obtained from (S, f){(\Sigma, \phi)} by a local modification near the binding.     

Inequivalent contact structures on Boothby–Wang five-manifolds

We consider contact structures on simply-connected five-manifolds which arise as circle bundles over simply-connected symplectic four-manifolds and show that invariants from contact homology are related to the divisibility of the canonical class of the symplectic structure. As an application we find new examples of inequivalent contact structures in the same equivalence class of almost contact structures with non-zero first Chern class.     

On the classification of certain planar contact structures

We focus on contact structures supported by planar open book decompositions. We study right-veering diffeomorphisms to keep track of overtwistedness property of contact structures under some monodromy changes. As an application we give infinitely many examples of overtwisted contact structures supported by open books whose pages are the four-punctured sphere, and also we prove that a certain family is Stein fillable using lantern relation.     

Embedding Generalized Petersen Graph in Books

A book embedding of a graph $G$ consists of placing the vertices of $G$ on a spine and assigning edges of the graph to pages so that edges in the same page do not cross each other. The page number is a measure of the quality of a book embedding which is the minimum number of pages in which the graph $G$ can be embedded. In this paper, the authors discuss the embedding of the generalized Petersen graph and determine that the page number of the generalized Petersen graph is three in some situations, which is best possible.     

Links in overtwisted contact manifolds

We prove that Legendrian and transverse links in overtwisted contact structures having overtwisted complements can be classified coarsely by their classical invariants. We further prove that any coarse equivalence class of loose links has support genus zero and construct examples to show that the converse does not hold.     

Symplectic invariants of elliptic fixed points

To the germ of an area--preserving diffeomorphism at an elliptic fixed point, we associate the germ of Mather's minimal action. This yields a strictly convex function which is symplectically invariant and comprises the classical Birkhoff invariants as the Taylor coefficients of its convex conjugate. In addition, however, the minimal action contains information about the local dynamics near the fixed point; for instance, it detects the C⁰--integrability of the diffeomorphism. Applied to the Reeb flow, this leads to new period spectrum invariants for three--dimensional contact manifolds; a particular case is the geodesic flow on a two--dimensional Riemannian manifold, where the period spectrum is the classical length spectrum.     

Isomorphism of the Groups of Vassiliev Invariants of Legendrian and Pseudo-Legendrian Knots

The study of the Vassiliev invariants of Legendrian knots was started by D. Fuchs and S. Tabachnikov who showed that the groups of C-valued Vassiliev invariants of Legendrian and of framed knots in the standard contact R³ are canonically isomorphic. Recently we constructed the first examples of contact 3-manifolds where Vassiliev invariants of Legendrian and of framed knots are different. Moreover in these examples Vassiliev invariants of Legendrian knots distinguish Legendrian knots that are isotopic as framed knots and homotopic as Legendrian immersions. This raised the question what information about Legendrian knots can be captured using Vassiliev invariants. Here we answer this question by showing that for any contact 3-manifold with a cooriented contact structure the groups of Vassiliev invariants of Legendrian knots and of knots that are nowhere tangent to a vector field that coorients the contact structure are canonically isomorphic.     

Infinitely many universally tight torsion free contact structures with vanishing Ozsváth–Szabó contact invariants

Ozsváth–Szabó contact invariants are a powerful way to prove tightness of contact structures but they are known to vanish in the presence of Giroux torsion. In this paper we construct, on infinitely many manifolds, infinitely many isotopy classes of universally tight torsion free contact structures whose Ozsváth–Szabó invariant vanishes. We also discuss the relation between these invariants and an invariant on T³ and construct other examples of new phenomena in Heegaard–Floer theory. Along the way, we prove two conjectures of K. Honda, W. Kazez and G. Matić about their contact topological quantum field theory. Almost all the proofs in this paper rely on their gluing theorem for sutured contact invariants.