Title: Tightness and Open Book Decompositions
Speaker: Andy Wand, University of California Berkeley
Date: Tuesday, December 11, 2012
Time: 11:15am – 12:15pm
Place:Seminar Room 313, Simons Center
Abstract: A well known result of Giroux tells us that isotopy classes of contact structures on a closed three manifold are in one to one correspondence with stabilization classes of open book decompositions of the manifold. We will introduce a stabilization-invariant property of open books which corresponds to tightness of the corresponding contact structure. We will mention applications to the classification of contact 3-folds, and also to the question of whether tightness is preserved under Legendrian surgery.