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Geometry-Topology Seminar

Thursday, November 11, 2004 - 4:30pm

Andras Stipsicz

Location

University of Pennsylvania

DRL 4C8

Tight contact structures on 3-manifolds seem to capture important differential topological information about the underlying 3-manifold. We will use contact surgery in order to construct contact structures on certain small Seifert fibered 3-manifolds and compute their contact Ozsvath-Szabo invariants in order to prove their tightness. In some cases, when coupled with convex surface theory, this approach leads to a complete classification of tight contact structures on the given 3-manifold. We will demonstrate this latter case by an example.