Exotic Stein fillings with arbitrary fundamental group

Let G be a finitely presentable group. We provide an infinite family of homeomorphic but pairwise non-diffeomorphic, symplectic but non-complex closed 4-manifolds with fundamental group G such that each member of the family admits a Lefschetz fibration of the same genus over the two-sphere. As a corollary, we also show the existence of a contact 3-manifold which admits infinitely many homeomorphic but pairwise non-diffeomorphic Stein fillings such that the fundamental group of each filling is isomorphic to G. Moreover, we observe that the contact 3-manifold above is contactomorphic to the link of some isolated complex surface singularity equipped with its canonical contact structure.     

Contact 3-manifolds with infinitely many Stein fillings

Infinitely many contact 3-manifolds each admitting infinitely many pairwise non-diffeomorphic Stein fillings are constructed. We use Lefschetz fibrations in our constructions and compute their first homologies to distinguish the fillings.

     

On symplectic cobordisms

In this note we make several observations concerning symplectic cobordisms. Among other things we show that every contact 3-manifold has infinitely many concave symplectic fillings and that all overtwisted contact 3-manifolds are “symplectic cobordism equivalent”. Received: 26 March 2001 / Revised version: 1 May 2001 / Published online: 28 February 2002     

Contact handle decompositions

We review Giroux's contact handles and contact handle attachments in dimension three and show that a bypass attachment consists of a pair of contact 1 and 2-handles. As an application we describe explicit contact handle decompositions of infinitely many pairwise non-isotopic overtwisted 3-spheres. We also give an alternative proof of the fact that every compact contact 3-manifold (closed or with convex boundary) admits a contact handle decomposition, which is a result originally due to Giroux.     

Cyclically symmetric hyperbolic spatial graphs in 3-manifolds

The aims of this paper is to prove that every closed connected orientable 3-manifold with an orientation-preserving periodic diffeomorphism contains infinitely many, setwise invariant, spatial graphs whose exteriors are hyperbolic 3-manifolds.     

A diophantine problem concerning cubes

This paper deals with the problem of finding n integers such that their pairwise sums are cubes. We obtain eight integers, expressed in parametric terms, such that all the six pairwise sums of four of these integers are cubes, 9 of the 10 pairwise sums of five of these integers are cubes, 12 pairwise sums of six of these integers are cubes, 15 pairwise sums of seven of these integers are cubes and 18 pairwise sums of all the eight integers are cubes. This leads to infinitely many examples of four positive integers such that all of their six pairwise sums are cubes. Further, for any arbitrary positive integer n, we obtain a set of 2(n+1) integers, in parametric terms, such that 5n+1 of the pairwise sums of these integers are cubes. With a choice of parameters, we can obtain examples with 5n+2 of the pairwise sums being cubes.     

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.     

Benz planes with pairwise secant circles

We prove that there exist infinitely many (B ^*)-geometries whose circles are pairwise secant.     

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.     

Left invariant contact structures on Lie groups

Amongst other results, we perform a ‘contactization’ method to construct, in every odd dimension, many contact Lie groups with a discrete center, unlike the usual (classical) contactization which only produces Lie groups with a non-discrete center. We discuss some applications and consequences of such a construction, construct several examples and derive some properties. We give classification results in low dimensions. A complete list is supplied in dimension 5. In any odd dimension greater than 5, there are infinitely many locally non-isomorphic solvable contact Lie groups. We also characterize solvable contact Lie algebras whose derived ideal has codimension one. For simplicity, most of the results are given in the Lie algebra version.     

Dehn filling, reducible 3-manifolds, and Klein bottles

Let be a compact, connected, orientable, irreducible 3-manifold whose boundary is a torus. We announce that if two Dehn fillings create reducible manifold and manifold containing Klein bottle, then the maximal distance is three.

     

Embedding a Graph‐Like Continuum in Some Surface

We show that a graph‐like continuum embeds in some surface if and only if it does not contain one of: a generalized thumbtack; or infinitely many K_{3, 3}s or K₅s that are either pairwise disjoint or all have just a single point in common.     

Annular Dehn fillings

We show that if a simple 3-manifold M has two Dehn fillings at distance , each of which contains an essential annulus, then M is one of three specific 2-component link exteriors in S ³ . One of these has such a pair of annular fillings with , and the other two have pairs with . Received: February 20, 1999.     

Complexity of Geometric Three-manifolds

We compute for all orientable irreducible geometric 3-manifolds certain complexity functions that approximate from above Matveev's natural complexity, known to be equal to the minimal number of tetrahedra in a triangulation. We can show that the upper bounds on Matveev's complexity implied by our computations are sharp for thousands of manifolds, and we conjecture they are for infinitely many, including all Seifert manifolds. Our computations and estimates apply to all the Dehn fillings of M 6 ₁ ³ (the complement of the three-component chain-link, conjectured to be the smallest triply cusped hyperbolic manifold), whence to infinitely many among the smallest closed hyperbolic manifolds. Our computations are based on the machinery of the decomposition into ‘bricks’ of irreducible manifolds, developed in a previous paper. As an application of our results we completely describe the geometry of all 3-manifolds of complexity up to 9.     

Algebraic Torsion in Contact Manifolds

We extract an invariant taking values in \mathbbNè{￥}{\mathbb{N}\cup\{\infty\}} , which we call the order of algebraic torsion, from the Symplectic Field Theory of a closed contact manifold, and show that its finiteness gives obstructions to the existence of symplectic fillings and exact symplectic cobordisms. A contact manifold has algebraic torsion of order 0 if and only if it is algebraically overtwisted (i.e. has trivial contact homology), and any contact 3-manifold with positive Giroux torsion has algebraic torsion of order 1 (though the converse is not true). We also construct examples for each k ? \mathbbN{k \in \mathbb{N}} of contact 3-manifolds that have algebraic torsion of order k but not k − 1, and derive consequences for contact surgeries on such manifolds.     

Geodesic knots in closed hyperbolic 3-manifolds

We consider the existence of simple closed geodesics or “geodesic knots” in finite volume orientable hyperbolic 3-manifolds. Every such manifold contains at least one geodesic knot by results of Adams, Hass and Scott in (Adams et al. Bull. London Math. Soc. 31: 81–86, 1999). In (Kuhlmann Algebr. Geom. Topol. 6: 2151–2162, 2006) we showed that every cusped orientable hyperbolic 3-manifold in fact contains infinitely many geodesic knots. In this paper we consider the closed manifold case, and show that if a closed orientable hyperbolic 3-manifold satisfies certain geometric and arithmetic conditions, then it contains infinitely many geodesic knots. The conditions on the manifold can be checked computationally, and have been verified for many manifolds in the Hodgson-Weeks census of closed hyperbolic 3-manifolds. Our proof is constructive, and the infinite family of geodesic knots spiral around a short simple closed geodesic in the manifold.      

Constructions Over Tournaments

We investigate tournaments that are projective in the variety that they generate, and free algebras over partial tournaments in that variety. We prove that the variety determined by three-variable equations of tournaments is not locally finite. We also construct infinitely many finite, pairwise incomparable simple tournaments.     

Nielsen equivalence and trisections

Geometriae Dedicata - The goal of this paper is to construct distinct trisections of the same genus on a fixed 4-manifold. For every $$k \ge 2$$ , we exhibit infinitely many manifolds with...     

Weak and strong fillability of higher dimensional contact manifolds

For contact manifolds in dimension three, the notions of weak and strong symplectic fillability and tightness are all known to be inequivalent. We extend these facts to higher dimensions: in particular, we define a natural generalization of weak fillings and prove that it is indeed weaker (at least in dimension five), while also being obstructed by all known manifestations of “overtwistedness”. We also find the first examples of contact manifolds in all dimensions that are not symplectically fillable but also cannot be called overtwisted in any reasonable sense. These depend on a higher dimensional analogue of Giroux torsion, which we define via the existence in all dimensions of exact symplectic manifolds with disconnected contact boundary.     

A finiteness result for Heegaard splittings

In this paper we show that for a given 3-manifold and a given Heegaard splitting there are finitely many preferred decomposing systems of 3g−3 disjoint essential disks. These are characterized by a combinatorial criterion which is a slight strengthening of Casson-Gordon's rectangle condition. This is in contrast to fact that in general there can exist infinitely many such systems of disks which satisfy just the Casson-Gordon rectangle condition.