Lagrangian Rabinowitz Floer homology and twisted cotangent bundles

We study the following rigidity problem in symplectic geometry: can one displace a Lagrangian submanifold from a hypersurface? We relate this to the Arnold Chord Conjecture, and introduce a refined question about the existence of relative leaf-wise intersection points, which are the Lagrangian-theoretic analogue of the notion of leaf-wise intersection points defined by Moser (Acta. Math. 141(1–2):17–34, 1978). Our tool is Lagrangian Rabinowitz Floer homology, which we define first for Liouville domains and exact Lagrangian submanifolds with Legendrian boundary. We then extend this to the ‘virtually contact’ setting. By means of an Abbondandolo–Schwarz short exact sequence we compute the Lagrangian Rabinowitz Floer homology of certain regular level sets of Tonelli Hamiltonians of sufficiently high energy in twisted cotangent bundles, where the Lagrangians are conormal bundles. We deduce that in this situation a generic Hamiltonian diffeomorphism has infinitely many relative leaf-wise intersection points.     

Bifurcations on contact manifolds

Consider a 1-parameter compactly supported family of Legendrian submanifolds of the 1-jet bundle of a compact manifold with its natural contact structure and a path of intersection points of the Legendrian family with the 1-jet of a constant function. Since the contact distribution is a symplectic vector bundle, it is possible to assign a Maslov-type index to the intersection path. We show that the non-vanishing of the Maslov intersection index implies that there exists at least one point of bifurcation from the given path of intersection points. This result can be viewed as a kind of analogue in bifurcation theory of the Arnold-Sandon conjecture on intersections of Legendrian submanifols. The proof is based on the technique of generating functions that relates the properties of Hamiltonian diffeomorphisms to the Morse theory of the associated functions.     

Isomorphism of the Groups of Vassiliev Invariants of Legendrian and Pseudo-Legendrian Knots

The study of the Vassiliev invariants of Legendrian knots was started by D. Fuchs and S. Tabachnikov who showed that the groups of C-valued Vassiliev invariants of Legendrian and of framed knots in the standard contact R³ are canonically isomorphic. Recently we constructed the first examples of contact 3-manifolds where Vassiliev invariants of Legendrian and of framed knots are different. Moreover in these examples Vassiliev invariants of Legendrian knots distinguish Legendrian knots that are isotopic as framed knots and homotopic as Legendrian immersions. This raised the question what information about Legendrian knots can be captured using Vassiliev invariants. Here we answer this question by showing that for any contact 3-manifold with a cooriented contact structure the groups of Vassiliev invariants of Legendrian knots and of knots that are nowhere tangent to a vector field that coorients the contact structure are canonically isomorphic.     

Contact complete integrability

Complete integrability in a symplectic setting means the existence of a Lagrangian foliation leaf-wise preserved by the dynamics. In the paper we describe complete integrability in a contact set-up as a more subtle structure: a flag of two foliations, Legendrian and co-Legendrian, and a holonomy-invariant transverse measure of the former in the latter. This turns out to be equivalent to the existence of a canonical ? ? ? ^n?1 structure on the leaves of the co-Legendrian foliation. Further, the above structure implies the existence of n commuting contact fields preserving a special contact 1-form, thus providing the geometric framework and establishing equivalence with previously known definitions of contact integrability. We also show that contact completely integrable systems are solvable in quadratures. We present an example of contact complete integrability: the billiard system inside an ellipsoid in pseudo-Euclidean space, restricted to the space of oriented null geodesics. We describe a surprising acceleration mechanism for closed light-like billiard trajectories.     

Lagrangian caps

We establish an h-principle for exact Lagrangian embeddings with concave Legendrian boundary. We prove, in particular, that in the complement of the unit ball B in the standard symplectic ${\mathbb{R}^{2n}, 2n \geq 6}$ R 2 n , 2 n ≥ 6 , there exists an embedded Lagrangian n-disc transversely attached to B along its Legendrian boundary, which is loose in the sense of Murphy (Loose Legendrian embeddings in high dimensional contact manifolds, arXiv:1201.2245, 2013).     

Algebraic Torsion in Contact Manifolds

We extract an invariant taking values in \mathbbNè{￥}{\mathbb{N}\cup\{\infty\}} , which we call the order of algebraic torsion, from the Symplectic Field Theory of a closed contact manifold, and show that its finiteness gives obstructions to the existence of symplectic fillings and exact symplectic cobordisms. A contact manifold has algebraic torsion of order 0 if and only if it is algebraically overtwisted (i.e. has trivial contact homology), and any contact 3-manifold with positive Giroux torsion has algebraic torsion of order 1 (though the converse is not true). We also construct examples for each k ? \mathbbN{k \in \mathbb{N}} of contact 3-manifolds that have algebraic torsion of order k but not k − 1, and derive consequences for contact surgeries on such manifolds.     

Rational symplectic field theory for Legendrian knots

We construct a combinatorial invariant of Legendrian knots in standard contact three-space. This invariant, which encodes rational relative Symplectic Field Theory and extends contact homology, counts holomorphic disks with an arbitrary number of positive punctures. The construction uses ideas from string topology.     

An Ozsváth–Szabó Floer homology invariant of knots in a contact manifold

Using the knot Floer homology filtration, we define invariants associated to a knot in a three-manifold possessing non-vanishing Floer co(homology) classes. In the case of the Ozsváth–Szabó contact invariant we obtain an invariant of knots in a contact three-manifold. This invariant provides an upper bound for the Thurston–Bennequin plus rotation number of any Legendrian realization of the knot. We use it to demonstrate the first systematic construction of prime knots in contact manifolds other than S³ with negative maximal Thurston–Bennequin invariant. Perhaps more interesting, our invariant provides a criterion for an open book to induce a tight contact structure. A corollary is that if a manifold possesses contact structures with distinct non-vanishing Ozsváth–Szabó invariants, then any fibered knot can realize the classical Eliashberg–Bennequin bound in at most one of these contact structures.     

S3上阿诺德弦猜想中的变分方法

本文使用变分方法证明了三维标准切触球的标准勒让德扭结，至少存在一个弦连结适应于标准切触结构的任何选定切触形式，这部分证明了著名的阿诺德弦猜想。     

Symplectic homology and periodic orbits near symplectic submanifolds

We show that a small neighborhood of a closed symplectic submanifold in a geometrically bounded aspherical symplectic manifold has non-vanishing symplectic homology. As a consequence, we establish the existence of contractible closed characteristics on any thickening of the boundary of the neighborhood. When applied to twisted geodesic flows on compact symplectically aspherical manifolds, this implies the existence of contractible periodic orbits for a dense set of low energy values.     

Implicit contact dynamics and Hamilton-Jacobi theory

In this paper, we introduce implicit Hamiltonian dynamics in the framework of contact geometry in two different ways: first, we introduce classical implicit Hamiltonian dynamics on a contact manifold, followed by evolution Hamiltonian dynamics. In the first case, implicit contact Hamiltonian dynamics is defined as a Legendrian submanifold of a tangent contact space, whilst the implicit evolution dynamic is understood as a Lagrangian submanifold of a certain symplectic space embedded into the tangent contact space. To conclude, we propose a geometric Hamilton-Jacobi theory for both of these formulations.     

Symplectic -handles and transverse links

A standard convexity condition on the boundary of a symplectic manifold involves an induced positive contact form (and contact structure) on the boundary; the corresponding concavity condition involves an induced negative contact form. We present two methods of symplectically attaching -handles to convex boundaries of symplectic -manifolds along links transverse to the induced contact structures. One method results in concave boundaries and depends on a fibration of the link complement over ; in this case the handles can be attached with any framing larger than a lower bound determined by the fibration. The other method results in a weaker convexity condition on the new boundary (sufficient to imply tightness of the new contact structure), and in this case the handles can be attached with any framing less than a certain upper bound. These methods supplement methods developed by Weinstein and Eliashberg for attaching symplectic -handles along Legendrian knots.

     

The Künneth formula in Floer homology for manifolds with restricted contact type boundary

We prove the Künneth formula in Floer (co)homology for manifolds with restricted contact type boundary. We use Viterbo's definition of Floer homology, involving the symplectic completion by adding a positive cone over the boundary. The Künneth formula implies the vanishing of Floer (co)homology for subcritical Stein manifolds. Other applications include the Weinstein conjecture in certain product manifolds, obstructions to exact Lagrangian embeddings, existence of holomorphic curves with Lagrangian boundary condition, as well as symplectic capacities. Supported by ENS Lyon, école Polytechnique (Palaiseau) and ETH (Zürich).     

A minimizing deformation of Legendrian submanifolds in the standard sphere

In this note we study the moduli space of minimal Legendrian submanifolds in the standard sphere S²ⁿ⁻¹. We show that new examples of minimal Legendrian submanifolds can be constructed, if we can solve a certain equation for a function on a nearby glued Legendrian submanifold. As a step toward solving this equation, we prove short-time existence for a particular gradient flow on the space of immersed Legendrian submanifolds. A new necessary condition for a Lagrangian embedding into is given.     

Identifying Dehn functions of Bestvina–Brady groups from their defining graphs

Geometriae Dedicata - In this paper, we construct the first families of distinct Lagrangian ribbon disks in the standard symplectic 4-ball which have the same boundary Legendrian knots, and are not...     

On symplectic cobordisms

In this note we make several observations concerning symplectic cobordisms. Among other things we show that every contact 3-manifold has infinitely many concave symplectic fillings and that all overtwisted contact 3-manifolds are “symplectic cobordism equivalent”. Received: 26 March 2001 / Revised version: 1 May 2001 / Published online: 28 February 2002     

关于辛同痕问题的一个注记

结合Gromov的思想和McDuff的工作，本文证明了在具有正第一陈类的有理直纹面的给定同调类中的任意两个辛嵌入球面都辛同痕，这样扩充了Gromov的一个经典结果．     

Tight contact structures with no symplectic fillings

We exhibit tight contact structures on 3-manifolds that do not admit any symplectic fillings. Oblatum 7-XII-2000 & 14-XI-2001?Published online: 9 April 2002     

Filtrations on the knot contact homology of transverse knots

We construct a new invariant of transverse links in the standard contact structure on ${\mathbb R }^3.$ This invariant is a doubly filtered version of the knot contact homology differential graded algebra (DGA) of the link, see (Ekholm et al., Knot contact homology, Arxiv:1109.1542, 2011; Ng, Duke Math J 141(2):365–406, 2008). Here the knot contact homology of a link in ${\mathbb R }^3$ is the Legendrian contact homology DGA of its conormal lift into the unit cotangent bundle $S^*{\mathbb R }^3$ of ${\mathbb R }^3$ , and the filtrations are constructed by counting intersections of the holomorphic disks of the DGA differential with two conormal lifts of the contact structure. We also present a combinatorial formula for the filtered DGA in terms of braid representatives of transverse links and apply it to show that the new invariant is independent of previously known invariants of transverse links.     

Averaging of Legendrian Submanifolds of Contact Manifolds

We give a procedure to ‘average’ canonically C¹-close Legendrian submanifolds of contact manifolds. As a corollary we obtain that, whenever a compact group action leaves a Legendrian submanifold almost invariant, there is an invariant Legendrian submanifold nearby. Mathematics Subject Classification (2000): 53D10.