A flat plumbing basket is a Seifert surface consisting of disk and bands contained in distinct pages the open book decomposition 3-sphere. In this paper, we examine close connections between baskets contact structure supported by book. As an application give lower bounds for numbers determine various knots links, including torus links.

To determine whether plumbing could be a source of nontuberculous mycobacteria (NTM) infection, during 2007-2009 I isolated NTM from samples from household water systems of NTM patients. Samples from 22/37 (59%) households and 109/394 (28%) total samples yielded NTM. Seventeen (46%) of the 37 households yielded ≥1 Mycobacterium spp. isolate of the same species as that found in the patient; in 7...

⋆ Partially supported by the National Science Foundation; Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellow. † Permanent address: Center for Theoretical Physics, MIT, Cambridge, Mass. 02139. Supported in part D.O.E. contract DE-AC02-76ER03069 and NSF grant PHY91-06210. We study the metric of minimal area on a punctured Riemann surface under the condition that all nontrivial homotopy closed curves be longer than ...

We construct the first smooth, horizonless “microstate geometries” that have the same charges, dipole charges and angular momenta as a BPS black ring whose horizon is macroscopic. These solutions have exactly the same geometry as black rings, except that the usual infinite throat is smoothly capped off at a very large depth. If the solutions preserve a U(1)×U(1) isometry, then this depth is lim...