Tight contact structures on hyperbolic homology 3-spheres

Abstract

We produce a large class of hyperbolic homology 3-spheres admitting arbitrarily many distinct tight contact structures. We also produce a sub-class admitting arbitrarily many distinct tight contact structures within the same homotopy class of oriented plane distributions. As a corollary, we give a recipe to construct hyperbolic L-spaces admitting arbitrarily many distinct tight contact structures. We also introduce a notion of geometric limits of contact structures compatible with geometric limits of hyperbolic manifolds and study the behavior of the tight contact structures we construct under geometric limits.