The curvature of contact structure on 3-manifolds

Vladimir Krouglov

Published 2008-02-07Version 1

We study the sectional curvature of plane distributions on 3-manifolds. We show that if the distribution is a contact structure it is easy to manipulate this curvature. As a corollary we obtain that for every transversally oriented contact structure on a closed 3-dimensional manifold $M$ there is a metric, such that the sectional curvature of the contact distribution is equal to -1. We also introduce the notion of Gaussian curvature of the plane distribution. For this notion of curvature we get the similar results.