%0 Journal Article
%T Torsion Invariants of Combed 3-Manifolds with Boundary Pattern and Legendrian Links
%A Riccardo Benedetti
%A Carlo Petronio
%J Mathematics
%D 1998
%I arXiv
%X We extend Turaev's definition of torsion invariants of 3-dimensional manifolds equipped with non-singular vector fields, by allowing (suitable) tangency circles to the boundary, and manifolds with non-zero Euler characteristic. We show that these invariants apply in particular to (the exterior of) Legendrian links in contact 3-manifolds. Our approach uses a combinatorial encoding of vector fields, based on standard spines. In this paper we extend this encoding from closed manifolds to manifolds with boundary.
%U http://arxiv.org/abs/math/9809148v1