Tight contact structures on Seifert fibered 3-manifolds

Seminar: 
Geometry & Topology
Event time: 
Thursday, April 7, 2005 - 12:30pm to Wednesday, April 6, 2005 - 8:00pm
Location: 
431 DL
Speaker: 
Andras Stipsicz
Event description: 

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.