Four-dimensional aspects of tight contact 3-manifolds

Abstract

We conjecture a four-dimensional characterization of tightness: A contact structure on a 3-manifold Y is tight if and only if a slice-Bennequin inequality holds for smoothly embedded surfaces in Y×[0,1]. An affirmative answer to our conjecture would imply an analogue of the Milnor conjecture for torus knots: If a fibered link L induces a tight contact structure on Y, then its fiber surface maximizes the Euler characteristic among all surfaces in Y×[0,1] with boundary L. We provide evidence for both conjectures by proving them for contact structures with nonvanishing Ozsváth–Szabó contact invariant.