Contact surgery and transverse invariants

The purpose of this paper is two-fold: (1) to derive new existence results for tight contact structures on closed 3-manifolds presented by integral surgery along knots in S^3, and (2) to introduce a new invariant for transverse knots in contact 3-manifolds. Regarding (1), we extend our previous existence results from surgeries along knots of genus g and maximal Thurston–Bennequin number 2g − 1 to surgeries along knots of genus g and maximal self-linking number 2g − 1