In this note we define three invariants of contact structures in terms of open books supporting the contact structures. These invariants are the support genus (which is the minimal genus of a page of a supporting open book for the contact structure), the binding number (which is the minimal number of binding components of a supporting open book for the contact structure with minimal genus pages) and the norm (which is minus the maximal Euler characteristic of a page of a supporting open book).
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.
In the present paper we describe compatible open books for the fibre connected sum along binding components of open books, as well as for the fibre connected sum along multi-sections of open books. As an application the first description provides simple ways of constructing open books supporting all tight contact structures on $T^3$, recovering a result by van Horn-Morris, as well as an open book supporting the result of a Lutz twist along a binding component of an open book, recovering a result by Ozbagci--Pamuk.
In this note we observe that while all overtwisted contact structures on compact 3--manifolds are supported by planar open book decompositions, not all contact structures are. This has relevance to invariants of contact structures and also to the Weinstein conjecture via work of Abbas Cieliebak and Hofer.
The aim of this paper is to give an alternative proof of a theorem about the existence of contact structures on five-manifolds due to Geiges. This theorem asserts that simply-connected five-manifolds admit a contact structure in every homotopy class of almost contact structures. Our proof uses the open book construction of Giroux.
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.
This paper is the sequel to "The equivalence of Heegaard Floer homology and embedded contact homology via open book decompositions I" and is devoted to proving some of the technical parts of the HF=ECH isomorphism.
We introduce the notion of a nested open book, a submanifold equipped with an open book structure compatible with an ambient open book, and describe in detail the special case of a push-off of the binding of an open book. This enables us to explicitly describe a natural open book decomposition of a fibre connected sum of two open books along their bindings, provided they are diffeomorphic and admit an open book structure themselves. Furthermore, we apply the results to contact open books, showing that the natural open book structure of a contact fibre connected sum of two adapted open books al…
We construct a contact 5-manifold supported by infinitely many distinct open books with the identity monodromy and pairwise exotic Stein pages (i.e. pages are pairwise homeomorphic but non-diffeomorphic Stein fillings of a fixed contact 3-manifold), moreover we describe a process of generating infinitely many such examples. In contrast to this result, on each of $\#_{n} S^{2}\times S^{3}$ and $\#_{n} S^{2}\tilde{\times} S^{3}$ $(n\geq 2)$ we construct infinitely many open books with pairwise exotic Stein pages (and identity monodromy) supporting mutually distinct contact structures.
If (S,h) is an open book with disconnected binding then we can form a new open book (S',h') by capping off one of the boundary components of S with a disk. We define a U-equivariant map on Heegaard Floer homology which sends c^+(S',h') to c^+(S,h), and we discuss various applications. In particular, we determine the support genera of almost all contact structures compatible with genus one, one boundary component open books. In addition, we compute the 3-dimensional invariant associated to any contact structure with non-vanishing contact invariant which is compatible with a genus one open book …
We give an elementary topological obstruction for a manifold $M$ of dimension $2q{+}1 \geq 7$ to admit a contact open book with flexible Weinstein pages and $c_1(π_2(M)) = 0$: if the torsion subgroup of the $q$-th integral homology group is non-zero, then no such contact open book exists. We achieve this by proving that a symplectomorphism of a flexible Weinstein manifold acts trivially on cohomology. We also produce examples of non-trivial loops of flexible contact structures using related ideas.
We demonstrate how to combinatorially calculate the EH-class of a compatible contact structure in the sutured Floer homology group of a balanced sutured three manifold which is associated to an abstract partial open book decomposition. As an application we show that every contact three manifold (closed or with convex boundary) can be obtained by gluing tight contact handlebodies whose EH-classes are nontrivial.
These are lecture notes from the Clay Mathematics Institute summer school ``Floer Homology, Gauge Theory, and Low Dimensional Topology'' Alfred Renyi Institute; www.claymath.org/programs/summer_school/2004/. The main goal of these notes is to sketch a proof of Giroux correspondence between open book decompositions of three manifolds and contact structures, and then discuss various applications of this correspondence.
We show that on any closed contact manifold of dimension greater than 1 a contact structure with vanishing contact homology can be constructed. The basic idea for the construction comes from Giroux. We use a special open book decomposition for spheres. The page is the cotangent bundle of a sphere and the monodromy is given by a left-handed Dehn twist. In the resulting contact manifold we exhibit a closed Reeb orbit that bounds a single finite energy plane. As a result, the unit element of the contact homology algebra is exact and so the contact homology vanishes. This result can be extended to…
We define the reduced Khovanov homology of an open book (S,h), and we 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,h). 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 o…
In this note, we define a new invariant of a Legendrian knot in a contact manifold using an open book decomposition supporting the contact structure. We define the support genus sg(L) of a Legendrian knot L in a contact 3-manifold (M, ξ) as the minimal genus of a page of an open book of M supporting the contact structure ξsuch that L sits on a page and the framing given by the contact structure and by the page agree. We show any null-homologous loose knot in an overtwisted contact structure has support genus zero. To prove this, we observe any topological knot or link in any 3-manifold M sits …
We use contact fiber sums of open book decompositions to define an infinite hierarchy of filling obstructions for contact 3-manifolds, called planar k-torsion for nonnegative integers k, all of which cause the contact invariant in Embedded Contact Homology to vanish. Planar 0-torsion is equivalent to overtwistedness, while every contact manifold with Giroux torsion also has planar 1-torsion, and we give examples of contact manifolds that have planar k-torsion for any $k \ge 2$ but no Giroux torsion, leading to many new examples of nonfillable contact manifolds. We show also that the complement…
Given an open book decomposition (S,h) adapted to a closed, oriented 3-manifold M, we define a chain map from a certain Heegaard Floer chain complex associated to (S,h) to a certain embedded contact homology chain complex associated to (S,h), as defined in arXiv:1008.2734, and prove that it induces an isomorphism on the level of homology. This implies the isomorphism between the hat version of Heegaard Floer homology of -M and the hat version of embedded contact homology of M.
By recent results of Baker--Etnyre--Van Horn-Morris, a rational open book decomposition defines a compatible contact structure. We show that the Heegaard Floer contact invariant of such a contact structure can be computed in terms of the knot Floer homology of its (rationally null-homologous) binding. We then use this description of contact invariants, together with a formula for the knot Floer homology of the core of a surgery solid torus, to show that certain manifolds obtained by surgeries on bindings of open books carry tight contact structures. Possible applications to lens space surgerie…
In this paper, we introduce the notions of an iterated planar Lefschetz fibration and an iterated planar open book decomposition and prove the Weinstein conjecture for contact manifolds supporting an open book that has iterated planar pages. For $n\geq 1$, we show that a $(2n+1)$-dimensional contact manifold $M$ supporting an iterated planar open book decomposition satisfies the Weinstein conjecture.
Giroux has described a correspondence between open book decompositions on a 3--manifold and contact structures. In this paper we use Heegaard Floer homology to give restrictions on contact structures which correspond to open book decompositions with planar pages, generalizing a recent result of Etnyre.
We study an explicit construction of planar open books with four binding components on any three-manifold which is given by integral surgery on three component pure braid closures. This construction is general, indeed any planar open book with four binding components is given this way. Using this construction and results on exceptional surgeries on hyperbolic links, we show that any contact structure of S^3 supports a planar open book with four binding components, determining the minimal number of binding components needed for planar open books supporting these contact structures. In addition,…
We discuss embedding of manifolds in the category of open books, contact manifolds and contact open books. We prove an open book version of the Haefliger--Hirsch embedding theorem by showing that every $k$-connected closed $n$-manifold ($n\geq 7$, $k < \frac{n-4}{2}$) admits an open book embedding in the trivial open book of $\mathbb{S}^{2n-k}$. We then prove that every closed manifold $M^{2n+1}$ that bounds an achiral Lefschetz fibration, admits open book embedding in the trivial open book of $\mathbb{S}^{2\lfloor\frac{3n}{2}\rfloor + 3}$. We also prove that every closed manifold $M^{2n+1}$ b…
The first author in recent work with D. Gay developed the notion of a Morse structure on an open book as a tool for studying closed contact 3-manifolds. We extend the notion of Morse structure to extendable partial open books in order to study contact 3-manifolds with convex boundary.
We construct an open book decomposition compatible with a contact structure given by a rational contact surgery on a Legendrian link in the standard contact $S^3$. As an application we show that some rational contact surgeries on certain Legendrian knots induce overtwisted contact structures.
We prove that if a contact manifold $(M,ξ)$ is supported by a planar open book, then Euler characteristic and signature of any Stein filling of $(M,ξ)$ is bounded. We also prove a similar finiteness result for contact manifolds supported by spinal open books with planar pages. Moving beyond the geography of Stein fillings, we classify fillings of some lens spaces.
In this paper we discuss the change in contact structures as their supporting open book decompositions have their binding components cabled. To facilitate this and applications we define the notion of a rational open book decomposition that generalizes the standard notion of open book decomposition and allows one to more easily study surgeries on transverse knots. As a corollary to our investigation we are able to show there are Stein fillable contact structures supported by open books whose monodromies cannot be written as a product of positive Dehn twists. We also exhibit several monoids in …
Given two open books with equal pages we show the existence of an exact symplectic cobordism whose negative end equals the disjoint union of the contact manifolds associated to the given open books, and whose positive end induces the contact manifold associated to the open book with the same page and concatenated monodromy. Using similar methods we show the existence of strong fillings for contact manifolds associated with doubled open books, a certain class of fiber bundles over the circle obtained by performing the binding sum of two open books with equal pages and inverse monodromies. From …
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.
We find a self-linking number formula for a given null-homologous transverse link in a contact manifold that is compatible with either an annulus or a pair of pants open book decomposition. It extends Bennequin's self-linking formula for a braid in the standard contact $3$-sphere.
A real 3-manifold is a smooth 3-manifold together with an orientation preserving smooth involution, called a real structure. In this article we study open book decompositions on smooth real 3-manifolds that are compatible with the real structure. We call them real open book decompositions. We show that each real open book carries a real contact structure and two real contact structures supported by the same real open book decomposition are equivariantly isotopic. We also show that every real contact structure on a closed 3-dimensional real manifold is supported by a real open book. Finally, we…
A two-dimensional open book (S,h) determines a closed, oriented three-manifold Y(S,h) and a contact structure C(S,h) on Y(S,h). The contact structure C(S,h) is Stein fillable if h is positive, i.e. h can be written as a product of right-handed Dehn twists. Work of Wendl implies that when S has genus zero the converse statement holds, that is if C(S,h) is Stein fillable then h is positive. On the other hand, results by Wand and by Baker, Etnyre and Van Horn-Morris imply the existence of counterexamples to the converse statement with S of arbitrary genus strictly greater than one. The main purpo…
Using square bridge position, Akbulut-Ozbagci and later Arikan gave algorithms both of which construct an explicit compatible open book decomposition on a closed contact $3$-manifold which results from a contact $(\pm 1)$-surgery on a Legendrian link in the standard contact $3$-sphere. In this article, we introduce the ``generalized square bridge position'' for a Legendrian link in the standard contact $5$-sphere and partially generalize this result to the dimension five via an algorithm which constructs relative open book decompositions on relative contact pairs.
We construct, somewhat non-standard, Legendrian surgery diagrams for some Stein fillable contact structures on some plumbing trees of circle bundles over spheres. We then show how to put such a surgery diagram on the pages of an open book for $S^3,$ with relatively low genus. Thus we produce open books with low genus pages supporting these Stein fillable contact structures, and in many cases it can be shown that these open books have minimal genus pages.
We use parameterized Morse theory on the pages of an open book decomposition to efficiently encode the contact topology in terms of a labelled graph on a disjoint union of tori (one per binding component). This construction allows us to generalize the notion of the front projection of a Legendrian knot from the standard contact $\mathbb{R}^3$ to arbitrary closed contact $3$-manifolds. We describe a complete set of moves on such front diagrams, extending the standard Legendrian Reidemeister moves, and we give a combinatorial formula to compute the Thurston-Bennequin number of a nullhomologous L…
Suppose that S is a surface with boundary and that g and h are diffeomorphisms of S which restrict to the identity on the boundary. Let Y_g, Y_h, and Y_{hg} be the three-manifolds with open book decompositions given by (S,g), (S,h), and (S,hg), respectively. We show that the Ozsvath-Szabo contact invariant is natural under a comultiplication map on Heegaard Floer homology. It follows that if the contact invariants associated to the open books (S, g) and (S, h) are non-zero then the contact invariant associated to the open book (S, hg) is also non-zero. We extend this comultiplication to a map …
We prove that in dimension 3 every nondegenerate contact form is carried by a broken book decomposition. As an application we get that if M is a closed irreducible oriented 3-manifold that is not a graph manifold, for example a hyperbolic manifold, then every nondegenerate Reeb vector field on M has positive topological entropy. Moreover, we obtain that on a closed 3-manifold, every nondegenerate Reeb vector field has either two or infinitely many periodic orbits, and two periodic orbits are possible only on the sphere or on a lens space.
Periodic surface homemorphisms (diffeomorphisms) play a significant role in the the Nielsen-Thurston classification of surface homeomorphisms. Periodic surface homeomorphisms can be described (up to conjugacy) by using data sets which are combinatorial objects. In this article, we start by associating a rational open book to a slight modification of a given data set, called marked data set. It is known that every rational open book supports a contact structure. Thus, we can associate a contact structure to a periodic map and study the properties of it in terms combinatorial conditions on marke…
We introduce a contact invariant in the bordered sutured Heegaard Floer homology of a three-manifold with boundary. The input for the invariant is a contact manifold $(M, ξ, \mathcal{F})$ whose convex boundary is equipped with a signed singular foliation $\mathcal{F}$ closely related to the characteristic foliation. Such a manifold admits a family of foliated open book decompositions classified by a Giroux Correspondence, as described in earlier work of Licata and Vértesi. We use a special class of foliated open books to construct admissible bordered sutured Heegaard diagrams and identify well…
In this paper, 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 holomorphically fillable using lantern relation.
We study open books (or open book decompositions) of a closed oriented 3-manifold which support overtwisted contact structures. We focus on a simple closed curve along which one can perform Stallings twist, called ``twisting loop''. We show that the existence of a twisting loop on the fiber surface of an open book is equivalent up to positive stabilization to the existence of an overtwisted disk in the contact manifold supported by the open book. We also show a criterion for overtwistedness using a certain arc properly embedded in the fiber surface, which is an extension of Goodman's one.
We examine open books with powers of fibered Dehn twists as monodromy. The resulting contact manifolds can be thought of as Boothby-Wang orbibundles over symplectic orbifolds. Using the mean Euler characteristic of equivariant symplectic homology we can distinguish these contact manifolds and hence show that some fibered Dehn twists are not symplectically isotopic to the identity relative to the boundary. This complements results of Biran and Giroux.
Consider a transverse knot which is the binding of an open book for the ambient contact manifold. In this paper, we show that the transverse invariants defined by Lisca, Ozsvath, Stipsicz, and Szabo (LOSS) are nonvanishing for such transverse knots. This is true regardless of whether or not the ambient contact structure is tight. We also prove a vanishing theorem for LOSS's Legendrian and transverse invariants. As a corollary, we show that if (T,π) is an open book with connected binding, then the complement of T has no Giroux torsion.
Let $(M,ξ)$ be a contact 3-manifold. We present two new algorithms, the first of which converts an open book $(Σ,Φ)$ supporting $(M,ξ)$ with connected binding into a contact surgery diagram. The second turns a contact surgery diagram for $(M,ξ)$ into a supporting open book decomposition. These constructions lead to a refinement of a result of Ding-Geiges, which states that every such $(M,ξ)$ may be obtained by contact surgery from $(S^{3},ξ_{std})$, as well as bounds on the support norm and genus of contact manifolds obtained by surgery in terms of classical link data. We then introduce Kirby …
The algorithm given by Akbulut-Ozbagci constructs an explicit open book decomposition on a contact three-manifold described by a contact surgery on a link in the three-sphere. In this article, we will improve this algorithm by using Giroux's contact cell decomposition process. Our algorithm is more economical on choosing the supporting genus of the open book; in particular it gives a good upper bound for the recently defined ``minimal supporting genus invariant'' of contact structures.
We study contact structures compatible with genus one open book decompositions with one boundary component. Any monodromy for such an open book can be written as a product of Dehn twists around dual non-separating curves in the once-punctured torus. Given such a product, we supply an algorithm to determine whether the corresponding contact structure is tight or overtwisted. We rely on Ozsv{á}th-Szab{ó} Heegaard Floer homology in our construction and, in particular, we completely identify the $L$-spaces with genus one, one boundary component, pseudo-Anosov open book decompositions. Lastly, we r…
The aim of this paper is to use mapping class group relations to approach the `geography' problem for Stein fillings of a contact 3-manifold. In particular, we adapt a formula of Endo and Nagami so as to calculate the signature of such fillings as a sum of the signatures of basic relations in the monodromy of a related open book decomposition. We combine this with a theorem of Wendl to show that for any Stein filling of a contact structure supported by a planar open book decomposition, the sum of the signature and Euler characteristic depends only on the contact manifold. This gives a simple o…
We give a short introduction to the contact invariant in bordered Floer homology defined by Földvári, Hendricks, and the authors. The construction relies on a special class of foliated open books. We discuss a procedure to obtain such a foliated open book and present a definition of the contact invariant. We also provide a "local proof", through an explicit bordered computation, of the vanishing of the contact invariant for overtwisted structures.
We describe explicit open books on arbitrary plumbings of oriented circle bundles over closed oriented surfaces. We show that, for a non-positive plumbing, the open book we construct is horizontal and the corresponding compatible contact structure is also horizontal and Stein fillable. In particular, we describe horizontal open books on some Seifert fibered 3--manifolds. As another application we describe horizontal open books isomorphic to Milnor open books for some complex surface singularities. Moreover we give examples of tight contact 3--manifolds supported by planar open books. As a cons…
We study fillings of contact structures supported by planar open books by analyzing positive factorizations of their monodromy. Our method is based on Wendl's theorem on symplectic fillings of planar open books. We prove that every virtually overtwisted contact structure on L(p,1) has a unique filling, and describe fillable and non-fillable tight contact structures on certain Seifert fibered spaces.
We show that if (B,π) is an open book decomposition of a contact 3-manifold (Y,ξ), then the complement of the binding B has no Giroux torsion. We also prove the sutured Heegaard-Floer c-bar invariant of the binding of an open book is non-zero.
We compute the Heegaard Floer homology of any rational homology 3-sphere with an open book decomposition of the form (T,ϕ), where T is a genus one surface with one boundary component. In addition, we compute the Heegaard Floer homology of any T^2-bundle over S^1 with first Betti number equal to one, and we compare our results with those of Lebow on the embedded contact homology of such torus bundles. We use these computations to place restrictions on Stein-filllings of the contact structures compatible with such open books, to narrow down somewhat the class of 3-braid knots with finite concord…
We describe explicit horizontal open books on some Seifert fibered 3--manifolds. We show that the contact structures compatible with these horizontal open books are Stein fillable and horizontal as well. Moreover we draw surgery diagrams for some of these contact structures.
