The curvature of contact structure on 3-manifolds

Abstract

We study the sectional curvature of plane distributions on 3-manifolds. We show that if the distribution is a contact structure it is easy to manipulate this curvature. As a corollary we obtain that for every transversally oriented contact structure on a closed 3-dimensional manifold $M$ there is a metric, such that the sectional curvature of the contact distribution is equal to -1. We also introduce the notion of Gaussian curvature of the plane distribution. For this notion of curvature we get the similar results.

9 pages

References in corpus (1)

• Homotopy classes of total foliations and bi-contact structures on three-manifolds

Cited by in corpus (3)

• Tightness in contact metric 3-manifolds
• On the extrinsic geometry of contact structures
• Principal cycles of one dimensional foliations associated to a plane field in ${\mathbb{E}}^3$