Contact Structures on elliptic 3-manifolds

Abstract

We show that an oriented elliptic 3-manifold admits a universally tight positive contact structure iff the corresponding group of deck transformations on $S^3$ preserves a standard contact structure pointwise. We also relate univerally tight contact structures on 3-manifolds covered by $S^3$ to the exceptional isomorphism $SO(4)=(SU(2)\times SU(2))/\pm 1$. The main tool used is equivariant framings of 3-manifolds.

10 pages; to appear in the Proceedings of the AMS