Tight surgeries on torus knots
Joint work with Hyunki Min, Bulent Tosun and Konstantinos Varvarezos,
Preprint 2026

We give a complete classification of tight contact structures on manifolds obtained from any surgery along any torus knot, which provides the first such classification on an infinite family of knots. The main tools are the classification of non-loose torus knots, bordered contact invariants via their immersed curve interpretations, and non-thickenable tori in knot complements. As a byproduct of this classification, we also give the first classification of contact structures on some surface bundles over the circle with fibers of genus larger than $1$. The symplectic fillability of these contact structures is also studied and leads to, among other things, the disproof of a conjecture of Ghiggini and Van Horn-Morris on Stein fillability of some contact structures on a Brieskorn sphere.

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