Year: 2026
Type: preprint
Abstract: In dimension 3, following Eliashberg-Thurston and Mitsumatsu, one can associate a transverse pair of oppositely oriented contact structures to any Anosov flow. We show that when the ambient manifold is hyperbolic, the isotopy classes of these contact structures completely determine the flow up to isotopy orbit equivalence. This then implies that on any closed hyperbolic 3-manifold, the number of Anosov flows modulo isotopy orbit equivalence is finite. This approach also yields an explicit bound on the number of orbit equivalence classes of Anosov flows in terms of the number of universally tight contact structures. In addition, we show finiteness of pseudo-Anosov flows for which the complement of the singular orbits is atoroidal and, in the non- hyperbolic case, we obtain a control on the dynamics of Anosov flows on the hyperbolic pieces of the JSJ-decomposition.
Source: arXiv (Cornell University)
Authors: Bowden, Jonathan, Colin, Vincent
Language: English
Subfield: Geometry and Topology
Field: Mathematics
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7208715153