We present new explicit tight and overtwisted contact structures on the (round) 3-sphere and the (flat) 3-torus for which the ambient metric is weakly compatible. Our proofs are based on the construction of nonvanishing curl eigenfields using suitable families of Jacobi or trigonometric polynomials. As a consequence, we show that the contact sphere theorem of Etnyre, Komendarczyk and Massot (2012) does not hold for weakly compatible metric as it was conjectured. We also establish a geometric rigidity for tight contact structures by showing that any contact form on the 3-sphere admitting a compatible metric that is the round one is isometric, up to a constant factor, to the standard (tight) contact form.
We obtain an asymptotic formula for the eigenvalue distribution function of the Laplace-Beltrami operator on the two-dimensional torus in the adiabatic limit given by a Kronecker foliation. Related problems in number theory are discussed.
Let S be a finite union of (pairwise disjoint but possibly knotted and linked) closed curves and tubes in the round sphere S^3 or in the flat torus T^3. In the case of the torus, S is further assumed to be contained in a contractible subset of T^3. In this paper we show that for any sufficiently large odd integer λthere exists a Beltrami field on S^3 or T^3 satisfying curl u = λu and with a collection of vortex lines and vortex tubes given by S, up to an ambient diffeomorphism.
Let $M$ be a compact orientable Seifered fibered 3-manifold without a boundary, and $α$ an $S^1$-invariant contact form on $M$. In a suitable adapted Riemannian metric to $α$, we provide a bound for the volume $\text{Vol}(M)$ and the curvature, which implies the universal tightness of the contact structure $ξ=\kerα$.
We draw connections between the field of contact topology and the study of Beltrami fields in hydrodynamics on Riemannian manifolds in dimension three. We demonstrate an equivalence between Reeb fields (vector fields which preserve a transverse nowhere-integrable plane field) up to scaling and rotational Beltrami fields on three-manifolds. Thus, we characterise Beltrami fields in a metric-independant manner. This correspondence yields a hydrodynamical reformulation of the Weinstein Conjecture, whose recent solution by Hofer (in several cases) implies the existence of closed orbits for all $C^\…
We show that the cone associated with a moment map for an action of a torus on a contact compact connected manifold is a convex polyhedral cone and that the moment map has connected fibers provided the dimension of the torus is bigger than 2 and that no orbit is tangent to the contact distribution. This may be considered as a version of the Atiyah - Guillemin - Sternberg convexity theorem for torus actions on symplectic cones and as a direct generalization of the convexity theorem of Banyaga and Molino for completely integrable torus actions on contact manifolds.
El Soufi-Ilias' theorem establishes a connection between minimal submanifolds of spheres and extremal metrics for eigenvalues of the Laplace-Beltrami operator. Recently, this connection was used to provide several explicit examples of extremal metrics. We investigate the maximality of these metrics and prove that all of them are not maximal.
We consider a contact manifold with a pseudo-Riemannian metric and define a contact vector field intrinsically associated to this pair of structures. We call this new differential invariant the contact Riemannian curl. On a Riemannian manifold, Killing vector fields are those that annihilate the metric; a Killing $1$-form is obtained from a Killing vector field by lowering indices. We show that the contact Riemannian curl vanishes if the metric is of constant curvature and the contact structure is defined by a Killing $1$-form. We also show that the contact Riemannian curl has a strong similar…
If a closed 3-manifold M supports a closed, nonsingular, irrational 1-form which linearly deforms into contact forms, then M supports a K-contact form. On the 3-torus, a closed nonsingular 1-form deforms linearly into contact forms if and only if it is a fibration 1-form. on any other 2-torus bundle over the circle, every closed, nonsingular 1-form deforms linearly into contact forms.
In this paper we introduce the notion of contact angle for an immersed surface in three dimensional sphere. We deduce formulas for the Laplacian and for the Gaussian curvature, and we classify minimal surfaces in $S^3$ with constant contact angle. Also, we give an example of a minimal surface in $S^3$ with non constant contact angle.
We provide a characterization of the Clifford Torus in S3 via moving frames and contact structure equations. More precisely, we prove that minimal surfaces in S3 with constant contact angle must be the Clifford Torus. Some applications of this result are then given, and some examples are discussed.
After observing that the well-known convexity theorems of symplectic geometry also hold for compact contact manifolds with an effective action of a torus whose Reeb vector field corresponds to an element of the Lie algebra of the torus, we use this fact together with a recent symplectic orbifold version of Delzant's theorem due to Lerman and Tolman [LT] to show that every such compact toric contact manifold can be obtained by a contact reduction from an odd dimensional sphere.
We give a simple model in the complex plane of the 0-surgery along a fibered knot of a closed 3-manifold M to yield a mapping torus M'. This model allows explicit relations between pseudoholomorphic curves in the symplectizations of M and M'. As an application we use it to compute the cylindrical contact homology of open books resulting from a positive Dehn twist on a torus with boundary.
We prove the LeBrun-Salamon Conjecture in low dimensions. More precisely, we show that a contact Fano manifold X of dimension 2n+1 that has reductive automorphism group of rank at least n-2 is necessarily homogeneous. This implies that any positive quaternion-Kahler manifold of real dimension at most 16 is necessarily a symmetric space, one of the Wolf spaces. A similar result about contact Fano manifolds of dimension at most 9 with reductive automorphism group also holds. The main difficulty in approaching the conjecture is how to recognize a homogeneous space in an abstract variety. We contr…
Let $(M,g)$ be a connected, closed, orientable Riemannian surface and denote by $λ_k(M,g)$ the $k$-th eigenvalue of the Laplace-Beltrami operator on $(M,g)$. In this paper, we consider the mapping $(M, g)\mapsto λ_k(M,g)$. We propose a computational method for finding the conformal spectrum $Λ^c_k(M,[g_0])$, which is defined by the eigenvalue optimization problem of maximizing $λ_k(M,g)$ for $k$ fixed as $g$ varies within a conformal class $[g_0]$ of fixed volume $textrm{vol}(M,g) = 1$. We also propose a computational method for the problem where $M$ is additionally allowed to vary over surfac…
The main purpose of this article is to classify contact structures on some 3-manifolds, namely lens spaces, most torus bundles over a circle, the solid torus, and the thickened torus T^2 x [0,1]. This classification completes earlier work (by Etnyre [math.DG/9812065], Eliashberg, Kanda, Makar-Limanov, and the author) and results from the combination of two techniques: surgery, which produces many contact structures, and tomography, which allows one to analyse a contact structure given a priori and to create from it a combinatorial image. The surgery methods are based on a theorem of Y. Eliashb…
Let S be a compact surface - or the interior of a compact surface - and let V be the manifold of cooriented contact elements of S equiped with its canonical contact structure. A diffeomorphism of V that preserves the contact structure and its coorientation is called a contact transformation over S. We prove the following results. 1) If S is neither a sphere nor a torus then the inclusion of the diffeomorphism group of S into the contact transformation group is 0-connected. 2) If S is a sphere then the contact transformation group is connected. 3) if S is a torus then the homomorphism from the …
A contact projective structure is a contact path geometry the paths of which are among the geodesics of some affine connection. In the manner of T.Y. Thomas there is associated to each contact projective structure an ambient affine connection on a symplectic manifold with one-dimensional fibers over the contact manifold and using this the local equivalence problem for contact projective structures is solved by the construction of a canonical regular Cartan connection. This Cartan connection is normal if and only if an invariant contact torsion vanishes. Every contact projective structure deter…
In the 3-dimensional Riemannian geometry, contact structures equipped with an adapted Riemannian metric are divergence-free, nondegenerate eigenforms of the Laplace-Beltrami operator. We trace out a 2-d analogue of this fact: there is a close relationship between the topology of the contact structure on a convex surface in the 3-manifold (the dividing curves) and the nodal curves of Laplacian eigenfunctions on that surface. Motivated by this relationship, we consider a topological version of Payne's conjecture for the free membrane problem. We construct counterexamples to Payne's conjecture fo…
We consider a family of tight contact structures on the three-dimensional torus and we compute the relative Contact Homology by using the variational theory of critical points at infinity. We will also show some algebraic equivariant homology reductions.
The $i$-th eigenvalue $λ_i$ of the Laplace-Beltrami operator on a surface can be considered as a functional on the space of all Riemannian metrics of unit volume on this surface. Surprisingly only few examples of extremal metrics for these functionals are known. In the present paper a new countable family of extremal metrics on the torus is provided.
This paper is concerned with the rational symplectic field theory in the Floer case. For this observe that in the general geometric setup for symplectic field theory the contact manifolds can be replaced by mapping tori of symplectic manifolds with symplectomorphisms. While the cylindrical contact homology is given by the Floer homologies of powers of the symplectomorphism, the other algebraic invariants of symplectic field theory provide natural generalizations of symplectic Floer homology. For symplectically aspherical manifolds and Hamiltonian symplectomorphisms we study the moduli spaces o…
By studying completely integrable torus actions on contact manifolds we prove a conjecture of Toth and Zelditch that toric integrable geodesic flows on tori must have flat metrics.
Let $(M^5,α,g_α,J)$ be a 5-dimensional Sasakian Einstein manifold with contact 1-form $α$, associated metric $g_α$ and almost complex structure $J$ and $L$ a contact stationary Legendrian surface in $M^5$. We will prove that $L$ satisfies the following equation \begin{eqnarray}\label{equ} -Δ^νH+(K-1)H=0, \end{eqnarray} where $Δ^ν$ is the normal Laplacian w.r.t the metric $g$ on $L$ induced from $g_α$ and $K$ is the Gauss curvature of $(L,g)$. Using equation \eqref{equ} and a new Simons' type inequality for Legendrian surfaces in the standard unit sphere $\mathbb{S}^5$, we prove an integral ine…
