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Geometric Topology

GeoTop Session #1.3

Subevent of GeoTop Session #1

Heritage Hall Building 126

Times: 2026 Mar 11 from 11:30AM to 12:00PM (Central Time (US & Canada))

Surgeries on knots and tight contact structures

Shunyu Wan <swan48@gatech.edu>, Georgia Institute of Technology

Abstract:

The existence and nonexistence of tight contact structures on the 3-manifold are interesting and important topics studied over the past thirty years. Etnyre-Honda found the first example of a 3-manifold that does not admit tight contact structure, and later Lisca-Stipsicz extended their result and showed that a Seifert fiber space admits a tight contact structure if and only if it is not the smooth (2n − 1)-surgery along the T(2,2n+1) torus knot for any positive integer n.

Surprisingly, since then no other example of a 3-manifold without tight contact structure has been found. Hence, it is interesting to study if all such manifolds, except those mentioned above, admit a tight contact structure. Towards this goal, I will discuss the joint work with Zhenkun Li and Hugo Zhou about showing any negative surgeries on any knot in S^3 admit a tight contact structure.

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