Structures de contact en dimension trois et bifurcations des feuilletages de surfaces

Contact structures on 3-manifolds are analyzed by decomposing the manifold along convex surfaces. Background results of Giroux, Eliashberg, Colin, and Honda are discussed with an emphasis on examples. Convex decompositions are then used to give a new proof of the Gabai-Eliashberg-Thurston Theorem on the existence of universally tight contact structures and also to study the contact topology of a space in the presence or absence of tori. Classification of tight contact structu...

A real 3-manifold is a smooth 3-manifold together with an orientation preserving smooth involution, which is called a real structure. A real contact 3-manifold is a real 3-manifold with a contact distribution that is antisymmetric with respect to the real structure. We show that every real 3-manifold can be obtained via surgery along invariant knots starting from the standard real $S^3$ and that this operation can be performed in the contact setting too. Using this result we ...

In this paper, we study the global behaviour of contact structures on oriented manifolds V which are circle bundles over a closed orientable surface S of genus g>0. We establish in particular contact analogs of a number of classical results about foliations due to Milnor, Wood, Thurston, Matsumoto, and Ghys. In Section~1, we prove that V carries a (positive) contact structure transverse to the fibers if and only if the Euler number of the fibration is less or equal to 2g-2. I...

We survey the interactions between foliations and contact structures in dimension three, with an emphasis on sutured manifolds and invariants of sutured contact manifolds. This paper contains two original results: the fact that a closed orientable irreducible 3-manifold M with nonzero second homol-ogy carries a hypertight contact structure and the fact that an orientable, taut, balanced sutured 3-manifold is not a product if and only if it carries a contact structure with non...

In this paper we develop a method for studying tight contact structures on lens spaces. We then derive uniqueness and non-existence statements for tight contact structures with certain (half) Euler classes on lens spaces. We also prove that any lens space admits only finitely many tight contact structures.

Two of the basic questions in contact topology are which manifolds admit tight contact structures, and on those that do, can we classify such structures. We present the first such classification on an infinite family of (mostly) hyperbolic 3-manifolds: surgeries on the figure-eight knot. We also determine which of the tight contact structures are symplectically fillable and which are universally tight.

In this paper, we study and almost completely classify contact structures on closed 3--manifolds which are totally geodesic for some Riemannian metric. Due to previously known results, this amounts to classifying contact structures on Seifert manifolds which are transverse to the fibers. Actually, we obtain the complete classification of contact structures with negative (maximal) twisting number (which includes the transverse ones) on Seifert manifolds whose base is not a sph...

Suppose $K$ is a knot in a 3-manifold $Y$, and that $Y$ admits a pair of distinct contact structures. Assume that $K$ has Legendrian representatives in each of these contact structures, such that the corresponding Thurston-Bennequin framings are equivalent. This paper provides a method to prove that the contact structures resulting from Legendrian surgery along these two representatives remain distinct. Applying this method to the situation where the starting manifold is $-\S...

We classify all contact structures with contact surgery number one on the Brieskorn sphere Sigma(2,3,11) with both orientations. We conclude that there exist infinitely many non-isotopic contact structures on each of the above manifolds which cannot be obtained by a single rational contact surgery from the standard tight contact 3-sphere. We further prove similar results for some lens spaces: We classify all contact structures with contact surgery number one on lens spaces of...

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...