×

Cabling, contact structures and mapping class monoids. (English) Zbl 1252.53089

Authors’ abstract: In this paper we discuss the change in contact structures as their supporting open book decompositions have their binding components cabled. To facilitate this and applications we define the notion of a rational open book decomposition that generalizes the standard notion of open book decomposition and allows one to more easily study surgeries on transverse knots. As a corollary to our investigation we are able to show there are Stein fillable contact structures supported by open books whose monodromies cannot be written as a product of positive Dehn twists. We also exhibit several monoids in the mapping class group of a surface that have contact geometric significance.

MSC:

53D10 Contact manifolds (general theory)
57M99 General low-dimensional topology