New Anosov flows via bicontact structures

Abstract: We present a new approach to hyperbolic plugs, via a construction of bicontact plugs on 3-manifolds with boundary that are surface bundles over the circle. The boundary components are quasi transverse tori, and we prove a gluing theorem that allows us to produce closed manifolds carrying new transitive Anosov flows. We show that a toroidal manifold produced by gluing two copies of the figure eight knot complement may carry many nonequivalent Anosov flows, and likewise a manifold composed of a figure eight complement and a trefoil complement. We further show that certain generalized Handel--Thurston surgeries can be realized as sequences of Goodman--Fried surgeries and produce new examples of different surgery sequences resulting in the same Anosov flow.