arXiv subjects
Publications and source records attributed to Hansjörg Geiges.
It has been shown by V. Colin that every tight contact 3-manifold can be written as a connected sum of prime manifolds. Here we prove that the summands in this decomposition are unique up to order and contactomorphism.
It is shown that the formula for the Chern classes (in the Chow ring) of blow-ups of algebraic varieties, due to Porteous and Lascu-Scott, also holds (in the cohomology ring) for blow-ups of symplectic and complex manifolds. This was used by the second-named author in her solution of the geography problem for 8-dimensional symplectic manifolds. The proof equally applies to real blow-ups of arbitrary manifolds and yields the corresponding blow-up formula for the Stiefel-Whitney classes. In the course of the argument the topological analogue of Grothendieck's `formule clef' in intersection theory is proved.
These are notes of a talk given at the Mathematische Arbeitstagung 2005 in Bonn. Following ideas of Ozbagci-Stipsicz, a proof based on contact Dehn surgery is given of Eliashberg's concave filling theorem for contact 3-manifolds. The role of that theorem in the Kronheimer-Mrowka proof of property P for nontrivial knots is sketched.
It is shown that Legendrian (resp. transverse) cable links in the 3-sphere with its standard tight contact structure, i.e. links consisting of an unknot and a cable of that unknot, are classified by their oriented link type and the classical invariants (Thurston-Bennequin invariant and rotation number in the Legendrian case, self-linking number in the transverse case). The analogous result is proved for torus knots in the 1-jet space of the circle with its standard tight contact structure.
This article is based on the author's inaugural lecture at the University of Cologne on 24 January 2003.
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).
This is an introductory text on the more topological aspects of contact geometry, written for the Handbook of Differential Geometry vol. 2. After discussing (and proving) some of the fundamental results of contact topology (neighbourhood theorems, isotopy extension theorems, approximation theorems), I move on to a detailed exposition of the original proof of the Lutz-Martinet theorem. The text ends with a guide to the literature.
For any knot T transverse to a given contact structure on a 3-manifold, we exhibit a Legendrian two-component link such that T equals the transverse push-off of one of the link components and contact (+1)-surgery on the link has the same effect as a Lutz twist along T.
In two previous papers, the two first-named authors introduced a notion of contact r-surgery along Legendrian knots in contact 3-manifolds. They also showed how (at least in principle) to convert any contact r-surgery into a sequence of contact plus or minus 1 surgeries, and used this to prove that any (closed) contact 3-manifold can be obtained from the standard contact structure on the 3-sphere by a sequence of such surgeries. In the present paper, we give a shorter proof of that result and a more explicit algorithm for turning a contact r-surgery into plus or minus 1 surgeries. We use this to give explicit surgery diagrams for all contact structures on the 3-sphere and S^1\times S^2, as well as all overtwisted contact structures on arbitrary closed, orientable 3-manifolds. This amounts to a new proof of the Lutz-Martinet theorem that each homotopy class of 2-plane fields on such a manifold is represented by a contact structure.
We prove that every closed, connected contact 3-manifold can be obtained from the 3-sphere with its standard contact structure by contact surgery of coefficient plus or minus 1 along a Legendrian link. As a corollary, we derive a result of Etnyre and Honda about symplectic cobordisms (in slightly stronger form).
We prove the existence of essential loops in the space of contact structures on torus bundles over the circle.
We continue the study of linear families of contact forms on 3-manifolds begun in our paper `Contact geometry and complex surfaces'. The present paper introduces Teichmuller and moduli spaces for so-called taut contact circles. By constructing a developing map for taut contact circles, we show that these geometrically defined deformation spaces are equivalent to certain spaces of representations of the fundamental group in appropriate Lie groups. Furthermore, we relate these deformation spaces to `classical' Teichmuller theory of Riemann surfaces and orbifolds.