We study invariant contact p-spheres on principal circle-bundles and solve the corresponding existence problem in dimension 3. Moreover, we show that contact p-spheres can only exist on (4n-1)-dimensional manifolds and we construct examples of contact p-spheres on such manifolds. We also consider relations between tautness and roundness, a regularity property concerning the Reeb vector fields of the contact forms in a contact p-sphere.
We prove rigidity and vanishing theorems for several holomorphic Euler characteristics on complex contact manifolds admitting holomorphic circle actions preserving the contact structure. Such vanishings are reminiscent of those of LeBrun and Salamon on Fano contact manifolds but under a symmetry assumption instead of a curvature condition.
Motivated by the moduli theory of taut contact circles on spherical 3-manifolds, we relate taut contact circles to transversely holomorphic flows. We give an elementary survey of such 1-dimensional foliations from a topological viewpoint. We describe a complex analogue of the classical Godbillon-Vey invariant, the so-called Bott invariant, and a logarithmic monodromy of closed leaves. The Bott invariant allows us to formulate a generalised Gauß-Bonnet theorem. We compute these invariants for the Poincaré foliations on the 3-sphere and derive rigidity statements, including a uniformisation theo…
In a 1983 paper with Frank Warner, we proved that the space of all great circle fibrations of the 3-sphere S^3 deformation retracts to the subspace of Hopf fibrations, and so has the homotopy type of a pair of disjoint two-spheres. Since that time, no generalization of this result to higher dimensions has been found, and so we narrow our sights here and show that in an infinitesimal sense explained below, the space of all smooth oriented great circle fibrations of the 2n+1 sphere S^(2n+1) deformation retracts to its subspace of Hopf fibrations. The tools gathered to prove this also serve to sh…
Classical work of Lee, Schultz, and Stolz relates the smooth transformation groups of exotic spheres to the stable homotopy groups of spheres. In this note, we apply recent progress on the latter to produce smooth circle and cyclic group actions on certain exotic spheres.
Given any smooth fibration of the unit 3-sphere by great circles, we show that the distribution of 2-planes orthogonal to the great circle fibres is a tight contact structure, a fact well known in the special case of the Hopf fibrations. The proof expresses hypothesis and conclusion as differential inequalities involving functions on disks transverse to the fibres, and shows that one inequality implies the other.
Extending our earlier results, we prove that certain tight contact structures on circle bundles over surfaces are not symplectically semi--fillable, thus confirming a conjecture of Ko Honda.
With the help of hyper-ideal circle pattern theory, we have developed a discrete version of the classical uniformization theorems for surfaces represented as finite branched covers over the Riemann sphere as well as compact polyhedral surfaces with non-positive curvature. We show that in the case of such surfaces discrete uniformization via hyper-ideal circle patterns always exists and is unique. We also propose a numerical algorithm, utilizing convex optimization, that constructs the desired discrete uniformization.
We investigate great circle links in the three-sphere, the class of links where each component is a great circle. Using the geometry of their complements, we classify such links up to five components. For any two-bridge knot complement, there is a finite cover that is the complement of a link of great circles in $S^3$. We show that for many two-bridge knots, this cover contains a closed incompressible surface. Infinitely many fillings of the two-bridge knot lift to fillings of great circle link where the incompressibility of this surface is preserved. Using this, we show that infinitely many f…
For a circle packing P on the sphere invariant under a geometrically finite Kleinian group, we compute the asymptotic of the number of circles in P of spherical curvature at most $T$ which are contained in any given region.
To embed the bouquet of $g$ circles $B_g$ into the $n$-sphere $S^n$ so that its full symmetry group action extends to an orthogonal actions on $S^n$, the minimal $n$ is $2g-1$. This answers a question raised by B. Zimmermann.
We give an elementary (not cut just paste) proof of results of Bott and Shchepin: the space of non-empty subsets of a circle of cardinality at most 3, which is called the third symmetric potency of the circle, is homeomorphic to a 3-sphere and the inclusion of the space of one element subsets is a trefoil knot. Moreover, we give an explicit simplicial decomposition of the third symmetric potency of the circle which is isomorphic to the Barnette sphere.
In this paper, we determine the group of contact transformations modulo contact isotopies for Legendrian circle bundles over closed surfaces of nonpositive Euler characteristic. These results extend and correct those presented by the first author in a former work. The main ingredient we use is connectedness of certain spaces of embeddings of surfaces into contact 3-manifolds. In the third section, this connectedness question is studied in more details with a number of (hopefully instructive) examples.
A ``hyperideal circle pattern'' in $S^2$ is a finite family of oriented circles, similar to the ``usual'' circle patterns but such that the closed disks bounded by the circles do not cover the whole sphere. Hyperideal circle patterns are directly related to hyperideal hyperbolic polyhedra, and also to circle packings. To each hyperideal circle pattern, one can associate an incidence graph and a set of intersection angles. We characterize the possible incidence graphs and intersection angles of hyperideal circle patterns in the sphere, the torus, and in higher genus surfaces. It is a consequenc…
The branched virtual fibering theorem by Sakuma states that every closed orientable $3$-manifold with a Heegaard surface of genus $g$ has a branched double cover which is a genus $g$ surface bundle over the circle. It is proved by Brooks that such a surface bundle can be chosen to be hyperbolic. We prove that the minimal entropy over all hyperbolic, genus $g$ surface bundles as branched double covers of the $3$-sphere behaves like 1/$g$. We also give an alternative construction of surface bundles over the circle in Sakuma's theorem when closed $3$-manifolds are branched double covers of the $3…
We define symplectic fractional twists, which generalize Dehn twists, and use these in open books to investigate contact structures. The resulting contact structures are invariant under a circle action, and share several similarities with the invariant contact structures that were studied by Lutz and Giroux. We show that left-handed fractional twists often give rise to non-fillable contact manifolds. These manifolds are in fact "algebraically overtwisted", yet they do not seem to contain bLobs, nor are they directly related to negative stabilizations. We also show that the Weinstein conjecture…
Given a closed contact 3-manifold with a compatible Riemannian metric, we show that if the sectional curvature is 1/4-pinched, then the contact structure is universally tight. This result improves the Contact Sphere Theorem in [EKM12], where a 4/9-pinching constant was imposed. Some tightness results on positively curved contact open 3-manifold are also discussed.
The following problem was proposed in 2010 by S. Lando. Let $M$ and $N$ be two unions of the same number of disjoint circles in a sphere. Do there always exist two spheres in 3-space such that their intersection is transversal and is a union of disjoint circles that is situated as $M$ in one sphere and as $N$ in the other? Union $M'$ of disjoint circles is {\it situated} in one sphere as union $M$ of disjoint circles in the other sphere if there is a homeomorphism between these two spheres which maps $M'$ to $M$. We prove (by giving an explicit example) that the answer to this problem is "no".…
Two constructions of contact manifolds are presented: (i) products of S^1 with manifolds admitting a suitable decomposition into two exact symplectic pieces and (ii) fibre connected sums along isotropic circles. Baykur has found a decomposition as required for (i) for all closed, oriented 4-manifolds. As a corollary, we can show that all closed, oriented 5-manifolds that are Cartesian products of lower-dimensional manifolds carry a contact structure. For symplectic 4-manifolds we exhibit an alternative construction of such a decomposition; this gives us control over the homotopy type of the co…
An oriented link projection is the image of a generic immersion of oriented circles into the 2-sphere. The circle arrangement of a link projection is a disjoint union of unoriented circles on the 2-sphere obtained by orientation-incoherent smoothing at each crossing point. We show that two oriented link projections have the same circle arrangement if and only if they are transformed into each other by certain local moves. We also show that every odd (resp. even) component link has a link projection whose circle arrangement consists of exactly one (resp. two) circles.
Murasugi sums can be defined as readily for Morse maps to the circle of (arbitrary) link complements in the 3-sphere as for fibrations over the circle of (fibered) link complements in the 3-sphere. As one application, I show that if a knot K has free genus m, then there is a Morse map from its complement to the circle (representing the relative homology class of a Seifert surface for K) with no more than 4m critical points.
We study compatible contact structures of fibered Seifert multilinks in homology 3-spheres and especially give a necessary and sufficient condition for the contact structure to be tight in the case where the Seifert fibration is positively twisted. As a corollary we determine the strongly quasipositivity of fibered Seifert links in the 3-sphere. We also study the compatible contact structures of cablings along links in any 3-manifolds.
We determine the minimum number of vertices needed to provide balanced triangulations of $\mathbb S^{d-2}$-bundles over $\mathbb S^1$. If $d$ is odd and the bundle is orientable, or $d$ is even and the bundle is non-orientable, the minimum number of vertices is $3d$; otherwise, it is $3d+2$. Similar results apply to all balanced simplicial complexes that triangulate homology manifolds with $β_1\neq 0$ and $β_2=0$, where $β_i$'s are the Betti numbers, computed with coefficients in $\mathbb Q$.
In this paper, sufficient conditions for contact $(+1)$-surgeries along Legendrian knots in contact rational homology 3-spheres to have vanishing contact invariants or to be overtwisted are given. They can be applied to study contact $(\pm1)$-surgeries along Legendrian links in the standard contact 3-sphere. We also obtain a sufficient condition for contact $(+1)$-surgeries along Legendrian two-component links in the standard contact 3-sphere to be overtwisted via their front projections.
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.
In this paper we study embeddings of contact manifolds using braidings of one manifold about another. In particular we show how to embed many contact 3-manifolds into the standard contact 5-sphere. We also show how to obstruct braidings of one manifold about another using contact geometry.
{\it Fold maps} are fundamental tools in generalizing the theory of Morse functions and its application to studies of geometric properties of manifolds. One of the fundamental and important problems in the theory of fold maps is to construct explicit fold maps, which are often difficult. In this paper, we construct new examples of {\it round fold maps}, which are defined as {\it stable fold maps} with singular value sets of concentric spheres introduced by the author on manifolds having the structures of circle bundles. The class of round fold maps includes some {\it special generic} maps on h…
In this short note, we exhibit an infinite family of hyperbolic rational homology $3$--spheres which do not admit any fillable contact structures. We also note that most of these manifolds do admit tight contact structures.
We study compatible contact structures of fibered, positively-twisted graph multilinks in the 3-sphere and prove that the contact structure of such a multilink is tight if and only if the orientations of its link components are all consistent with or all opposite to the orientation of the fibers of the Seifert fibrations of that graph multilink. As a corollary, we show that the compatible contact structures of the Milnor fibrations of real analytic germs of the form (f\bar g,O) are always overtwisted.
We prove that independence complex of a bipartite circle graph is homotopy equivalent to a wedge of spheres, resolving a conjecture posed by Przytycki and Silvero. As a corollary, we obtain that extreme Khovanov spectrum, $\mathcal{X}_{j_{extreme}}$ is homotopy equivalent to a wedge of spheres. In particular, the extreme Khovanov homology has no torsion.
We prove the existence of exotic but homotopically trivial contact structures on spheres of dimension 8k-1. Together with previous results of Eliashberg and the second author this establishes the existence of such structures on all odd-dimensional spheres (of dimension at least 3).
Let E be a circle bundle over a Riemann surface that supports a contact structure transverse to the fibers. This paper presents a combinatorial definition of a differential graded algebra (DGA) that is an invariant of Legendrian knots in E. The invariant generalizes Chekanov's combinatorial DGA invariant of Legendrian knots in the standard contact 3-space using ideas from Eliashberg, Givental, and Hofer's contact homology. The main difficulty lies in dealing with what are ostensibly 1-parameter families of generators for the DGA; these are solved using ``Morse-Bott'' techniques. As an applicat…
A point q in a contact manifold is called a translated point for a contactomorphism ϕ, with respect to some fixed contact form, if ϕ(q) and q belong to the same Reeb orbit and the contact form is preserved at q. In this article we discuss a version of the Arnold conjecture for translated points of contactomorphisms and, using generating functions techniques, we prove it in the case of spheres (under a genericity assumption) and projective spaces.
We prove that the group of strict contactomorphisms of the standard tight contact structure on the three-sphere deformation retracts to its unitary subgroup U(2).
We consider here the $3$-sphere $\mathbf S^3$ seen as the boundary at infinity of the complex hyperbolic plane $\mathbf{H}^2_{\mathbf C}$. It comes equipped with a contact structure and two classes of special curves. First $\mathbf R$-circles are boundaries at infinity of totally real totally geodesic subspaces and are tangent to the contact distribution. Second, $\mathbf C$-circles, which are boundaries of complex totally geodesic subspaces and are transverse to the contact distribution. We define a quantitative notion, called slimness, that measures to what extent a continuous path in the sp…
In this note we introduce the (homologically essential) arc complex of a surface as a tool for studying properties of open book decompositions and contact structures. After characterizing destabilizability in terms of the essential translation distance of the monodromy of an open book we given an application of this result to show that there are planer open books of the standard contact structure on the 3-sphere with 5 (or any number larger than 5) boundary components that do not destabilize. We also show that any planar open book with 4 or fewer boundary components does destabilize.
An elementary geometric construction is used to relate the space of lattices in a plane to the space exp_3(S^1) of the subsets of a circle of cardinality at most 3. As a consequence we obtain new proofs of a theorem of Bott which says that exp_3(S^1) is homeomorphic to a 3-sphere and a theorem of Shchepin which says that points of exp_3(S^1) that correspond to one-point subsets form a trefoil knot in this 3-sphere.
We characterize those unions of embedded disjoint circles in the 2-sphere which can be the multiple point set of a generic immersion of the 2-sphere into 3-dimensional space in terms of the interlacement of the given circles. Our result is the one higher dimensional analogue of Rosenstiehl's characterization of words being Gauss codes of self-crossing plane curves. Our proof uses a result of Lippner and we further generalize the ideas of Fraysseix and Ossona de Mendez, which leads us to directed interlacement graphs of paired trees and their local complementation.
A Bott tower is the total space of a tower of fibre bundles with base CP^1 and fibres CP^1. Every Bott tower of height n is a smooth projective toric variety whose moment polytope is combinatorially equivalent to an n-cube. A circle action is semifree if it is free on the complement to fixed points. We show that a (quasi)toric manifold (in the sense of Davis-Januszkiewicz) over an n-cube with a semifree circle action and isolated fixed points is a Bott tower. Then we show that every Bott tower obtained in this way is topologically trivial, that is, homeomorphic to a product of 2-spheres. This …
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.
In this note we show that a closed oriented contact manifold is obtained from the standard contact sphere of the same dimension by contact surgeries on isotropic and coisotropic spheres. In addition, we observe that all closed oriented contact manifolds admit symplectic caps.
We show the existence of tight contact structures on infinitely many hyperbolic three-manifolds obtained via Dehn surgeries along sections of hyperbolic surface bundles over circle.
