Contact Dehn surgery, symplectic fillings, and Property P for knots

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.Comment: 9 page

E8E_8-plumbings and exotic contact structures on spheres

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).Comment: 12 page

Transversely holomorphic flows and contact circles on spherical 3-manifolds

Motivated by the moduli theory of taut contact circles on spherical 3-manifolds, we relate taut contact circles to transversely holomorphic flows. We give an elementary survey of such 1-dimensional foliations from a topological viewpoint. We describe a complex analogue of the classical Godbillon-Vey invariant, the so-called Bott invariant, and a logarithmic monodromy of closed leaves. The Bott invariant allows us to formulate a generalised Gau{\ss}-Bonnet theorem. We compute these invariants for the Poincar\'e foliations on the 3-sphere and derive rigidity statements, including a uniformisation theorem for orbifolds. These results are then applied to the classification of taut contact circles.Comment: 31 pages, 3 figures; v2: changes to the exposition, additional reference

A formula for the Chern classes of symplectic blow-ups

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.Comment: 19 page