size_contact_nbhd Some remarks on the size of tubular neighborhoods in contact topology and fillability Klaus Niederkrüger Francisco Presas http://dx.doi.org/10.2140/gt.2010.14.719 Geom. & Topo. 14 (2010) 719-754 2010 gt.jpg
The well-known tubular neighborhood theorem for contact submanifolds states that a small enough neighborhood of such a submanifold N is uniquely determined by the contact structure on N, and the conformal symplectic structure of the normal bundle. In particular, if the submanifold N has trivial normal bundle then its tubular neighborhood will be contactomorphic to a neighborhood of N×{0} in the model space N×R2k.
In this article we make the observation that if (N,ξN) is a 3-dimensional overtwisted submanifold with trivial normal bundle in (M,ξ), and if its model neighborhood is sufficiently large, then (M,ξ) does not admit a symplectically aspherical filling.
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