Tight contact structures on some families of small Seifert fiber spaces

Abstract

Suppose K is a knot in a 3-manifold Y, and that Y admits a pair of distinct contact structures. Assume that K has Legendrian representatives in each of these contact structures, such that the corresponding Thurston-Bennequin framings are equivalent. This paper provides a method to prove that the contact structures resulting from Legendrian surgery along these two representatives remain distinct. Applying this method to the situation where the starting manifold is \(-\Sigma(2,3,6m+1)\) and the knot is a singular fiber, together with convex surface theory we can classify the tight contact structures on certain families of Seifert fiber spaces.