Workshop on Flows, Foliations and Contact Structures

The modern development of contact geometry in 3 dimensions has seen several (due to Giroux, Wendl, Latschev and Wendl, Hutchings, and others) invariants of contact structures meant in some sense to measure non-(Stein /symplectic)-fillability of the structure. Time permitting, we will discuss two new approaches, which rely on Giroux's theory of open book decompositions: the first a more topological construction generalizing a characterization of tightness in terms of open book decompositions, the second (in joint work with Kutluhan, Matic, and Van Horn-Morris) a refinement of the Heegaard-Floer contact class, inspired by the `algebraic torsion' of Latschev and Wendl, and Hutchings.