On overtwisted, right-veering open books

We exhibit infinitely many overtwisted, right-veering, non-destabilizable open books, thus providing infinitely many counterexamples to a conjecture of Honda-Kazez-Matic. The page of all our open books is a four-holed sphere and the underlying 3-manifolds are lens spaces.Comment: 6 pages, 4 figures. v2: minor edits, accepted for publication in the Pacific Journal of Mathematic

Sums of lens spaces bounding rational balls

We classify connected sums of three-dimensional lens spaces which smoothly bound rational homology balls. We use this result to determine the order of each lens space in the group of rational homology 3-spheres up to rational homology cobordisms, and to determine the concordance order of each 2-bridge knot.Comment: 20 pages, 4 figure

On 3-braid knots of finite concordance order

We study 3-braid knots of finite smooth concordance order. A corollary of our main result is that a chiral 3-braid knot of finite concordance order is ribbon.Comment: To appear in Transactions of the American Mathematical Society. 25 pages, 4 figure

Open book decompositions versus prime factorizations of closed, oriented 3-manifolds

Let $M$ be a closed, oriented, connected 3--manifold and $(B,\pi)$ an open book decomposition on $M$ with page $\Sigma$ and monodromy $\varphi$. It is easy to see that the first Betti number of $\Sigma$ is bounded below by the number of $S^2\times S^1$--factors in the prime factorization of $M$. Our main result is that equality is realized if and only if $\varphi$ is trivial and $M$ is a connected sum of $S^2\times S^1$'s. We also give some applications of our main result, such as a new proof of the result by Birman and Menasco that if the closure of a braid with $n$ strands is the unlink with $n$ components then the braid is trivial.Comment: 8 pages, 1 figure. Submitted to the proceedings of the conference "Interactions between low dimensional topology and mapping class groups", July 1-5, 2013, Max Planck Institute for Mathematics, Bon

On Stein fillings of contact torus bundles

We consider a large family F of torus bundles over the circle, and we use recent work of Li--Mak to construct, on each Y in F, a Stein fillable contact structure C. We prove that (i) each Stein filling of (Y,C) has vanishing first Chern class and first Betti number, (ii) if Y in F is elliptic then all Stein fillings of (Y,C) are pairwise diffeomorphic and (iii) if Y in F is parabolic or hyperbolic then all Stein fillings of (Y,C) share the same Betti numbers and fall into finitely many diffeomorphism classes. Moreover, for infinitely many hyperbolic torus bundles Y in F we exhibit non-homotopy equivalent Stein fillings of (Y,C).Comment: 18 pages, 10 figures. This preprint version differs from the final version which is to appear in the Bulletin of the London Mathematical Societ

Signatures, Heegaard Floer correction terms and quasi-alternating links

Turaev showed that there is a well-defined map assigning to an oriented link L in the three-sphere a Spin structure t_0 on Sigma(L), the 2-fold cover of S^3 branched along L. We prove, generalizing results of Manolescu-Owens and Donald-Owens, that for an oriented quasi-alternating link L the signature of L equals minus four times the Heegaard Floer correction term of (Sigma(L), t_0).Comment: V2: Improved exposition incorporating referee's suggestions; 3 figures, 6 pages. Accepted for publication by the Proceedings of the American Mathematical Societ

Contact surgery and transverse invariants

We derive new existence results for tight contact structures on certain 3-manifolds which can be presented as surgery along specific knots in S^3. Indeed, we extend our earlier results on knots with maximal Thurston-Bennequin number being equal to 2g-1 to knots for which the maximal self-linking number satisfies the same equality. In the argument (using contact surgery) we define an invariant for transverse knots in contact 3-manifolds under the assumption that either the knot is null-homologous or the 3-manifold has no S^1xS^2-factor in its prime decomposition, and we study its properties using the Ozsvath-Szabo contact invariant.Comment: 25 pages, 8 figures. Text and figures slightly edited. Accepted for publication by the Journal of Topolog