We give an $h$--principle type result for a class of Legendrian embeddings in contact manifolds of dimension at least $5$. These Legendrians, referred to as loose, have trivial pseudo-holomorphic invariants. We demonstrate they are classified up to Legendrian isotopy by their smooth isotopy class equipped with an almost complex framing. This result is inherently high dimensional: analogous results in dimension $3$ are false.
Loose Legendrian n-submanifolds, for n at least 2, were introduced by Murphy and proved to be flexible in the h-principle sense: any two loose Legendrian submanifolds that are formally Legendrian isotopic are also actually Legendrian isotopic. Legendrian contact homology is a Floer theoretic invariant that associates a differential graded algebra (DGA) to a Legendrian submanifold. The DGA of a loose Legendrian submanifold is trivial.
In this paper, via h-principle we prove that there exist contractible positive loops of Legendrian embeddings based at any loose Legendrian submanifold. As an application, we define a new partial order on $\widetilde{Cont}_0(M,ξ)$ and prove that overtwisted contact manifolds are weakly non-orderable.
Arboreal singularities are an important class of Lagrangian singularities. They are conical, meaning that they can be understood by studying their links, which are singular Legendrian spaces in $S^{2n-1}_{\text{std}}$. Loose Legendrians are a class of Legendrian spaces which satisfy an $h$--principle, meaning that their geometric classification is in bijective correspondence with their topological types. For the particular case of the linear arboreal singularities, we show that constructable sheaves suffice to detect whether any closed set of an arboreal link is loose.
We show that the presence of a plastikstufe induces a certain degree of flexibility in contact manifolds of dimension 2n+1>3. More precisely, we prove that every Legendrian knot whose complement contains a "nice" plastikstufe can be destabilized (and, as a consequence, is loose). As an application, it follows in certain situations that two non-isomorphic contact structures become isomorphic after connect-summing with a manifold containing a plastikstufe.
In this short note, we provide a criterion for DGA-homotopy of augmentations of Chekanov-Eliashberg algebra of disconnected Legendrian submanifolds. We apply the criterion to obtain the extension of geography results of Bourgeois and Galant concerning bilinearized Legendrian contact homology to the case of disconnected Legendrian submanifolds.
We study Legendrian and transverse realizations of the negative torus knots $T_{(p,-q)}$ in all contact structures on the $3$-sphere. We give a complete classification of the strongly non-loose transverse realizations and the strongly non-loose Legendrian realizations with the Thurston-Bennequin invariant smaller than $-pq$. Additionally, we show that the strongly non-loose transverse realizations $T$ are classified by their non-zero invariants $\mathfrak T(T)$ in the minus version of the knot Floer homology. However, not all the elements of $HFK^-(T_{(p,q)})$ can be realized. Along the way, w…
We prove a complete classification theorem for loose Legendrian knots in an oriented 3-manifold, generalizing results of Dymara and Ding-Geiges. Our approach is to classify knots in a $3$-manifold $M$ that are transverse to a nowhere-zero vector field $V$ up to the corresponding isotopy relation. Such knots are called $V$-transverse. A framed isotopy class is simple if any two $V$-transverse knots in that class which are homotopic through $V$-transverse immersions are $V$-transverse isotopic. We show that all knot types in $M$ are simple if any one of the following three conditions hold: $1.$ …
This article is a continuation of [15]. For Legendrian surfaces in $1$-jet spaces, we prove that the Cellular DGA defined in [15] is stable tame isomorphic to the Legendrian contact homology DGA.
We study homotopically non-trivial spheres of Legendrians in the standard contact R3 and S3. We prove that there is a homotopy injection of the contactomorphism group of S3 into some connected components of the space of Legendrians induced by the natural action. We also provide examples of loops of Legendrians that are non-trivial in the space of formal Legendrians, and thus non-trivial as loops of Legendrians, but which are trivial as loops of smooth embeddings for all the smooth knot types.
Take a sequence of contactomorphisms of a contact three-manifold that $C^0$-converges to a homeomorphism. If the images of a Legendrian knot limit to a smooth knot under this sequence, we show that it is Legendrian. We prove this by establishing that, on one hand, non-Legendrian knots admit a type of contact-squeezing onto transverse knots while, on the other, Legendrian knots do not admit such a squeezing. The non-trivial input from contact topology that is needed is (a local version of) the Thurston--Bennequin inequality.
Sivek proves a "van Kampen" decomposition theorem for the combinatorial Legendrian contact algebra (also known as the Chekanov-Eliashberg algebra) of knots in standard contact $\R^3$ . We prove an analogous result for the holomorphic curve version of the Legendrian contact algebra of certain Legendrians submanifolds in standard contact $J^1(M).$ This includes all 1- and 2-dimensional Legendrians, and some higher dimensional ones. We present various applications including a Mayer-Vietoris sequence for linearized contact homology similar to Sivek's and a connect sum formula for the augmentation …
By a result due to Ziltener, there exist no closed embedded Bohr-Sommerfeld Lagrangians inside $\mathbb CP^n$ for the prequantisation bundle whose total space is the standard contact sphere. On the other hand, any embedded monotone Lagrangian torus has a canonical nontrivial cover which is a Bohr-Sommerfeld immersion. We draw the front projections for the corresponding Legendrian lifts inside a contact Darboux ball of the threefold covers of both the two-dimensional Clifford and Chekanov tori (the former is the Legendrian link of the Harvey-Lawson special Lagrangian cone), and compute the asso…
In this paper we prove the presence of an embedded plastikstufe implies overtwistedness of the contact structure in any dimension. Moreover, we show in dimension 5 that the presence of an embedded bordered Legendrian open book (bLob) also implies overtwistedness. Applications of these criteria to certain (contact) fibered connected sums and open books are discussed.
Using the structural theorems developed in [Hua13], we study the deformation theory of coisotropic submanifolds in contact manifolds, under the assumption that the characteristic foliation is nonsingular. In the "middle" dimensions, we find an interesting relationship with foliation theory. Some elementary applications of contact geometry in foliation theory are explored.
We construct a Legendrian 2-torus in the 1-jet space of $S^1\times\R$ (or of $\R^2$) from a loop of Legendrian knots in the 1-jet space of $\R$. The differential graded algebra (DGA) for the Legendrian contact homology of the torus is explicitly computed in terms of the DGA of the knot and the monodromy operator of the loop. The contact homology of the torus is shown to depend only on the chain homotopy type of the monodromy operator. The construction leads to many new examples of Legendrian knotted tori. In particular, it allows us to construct a Legendrian torus with DGA which does not admit…
We relate the version of rational Symplectic Field Theory for exact Lagrangian cobordisms introduced in [5] with linearized Legendrian contact homology. More precisely, if $L\subset X$ is an exact Lagrangian submanifold of an exact symplectic manifold with convex end $Λ\subset Y$, where $Y$ is a contact manifold and $Λ$ is a Legendrian submanifold, and if $L$ has empty concave end, then the linearized Legendrian contact cohomology of $Λ$, linearized with respect to the augmentation induced by $L$, equals the rational SFT of $(X,L)$. Following ideas of P. Seidel, this equality in combination wi…
Let $Λ$ be a link of Legendrian spheres in the boundary of a subcritical $2n$-dimensional Weinstein manifold $X$. We show that, under some geometrical assumptions, the computation of the Legendrian contact homology of $Λ$ can be reduced to a computation of Legendrian contact homology in 1--jet spaces. Since the Legendrian contact homology in 1--jet spaces is well studied, this gives a simplified way to compute the Legendrian contact homology of $Λ$. We restrict to the case when the attaching spheres of the subcritical handles of $X$ do not interact with each other, and we assume that there are…
In this note we study several aspects of coisotropic submanifolds of a contact manifold. In particular we give a structure theorem for the singularity of the characteristic foliation of a coisotropic submanifold. Moreover we establish the existence and uniqueness results of germs of contact structures near Legendrian foliations, which is a special case of coisotropic submanifold. This note can be thought of as an attempt to generalize the study of surfaces in three-dimensional contact geometry to higher dimensions.
In this article, we prove a Legendrian Whitney trick which allows for the removal of intersections between codimension-two contact submanifolds and Legendrian submanifolds, assuming such a smooth cancellation is possible. This technique is applied to show the existence h-principle for codimension-two contact embeddings with a prescribed contact structure.
We study Legendrian embeddings of a compact Legendrian submanifold $L$ sitting in a closed contact manifold $(M,ξ)$ whose contact structure is supported by a (contact) open book $\mathcal{OB}$ on $M$. We prove that if $\mathcal{OB}$ has Weinstein pages, then there exist a contact structure $ξ'$ on $M$, isotopic to $ξ$ and supported by $\mathcal{OB}$, and a contactomorphism $f:(M,ξ) \to (M,ξ')$ such that the image $f(L)$ of any such submanifold can be Legendrian isotoped so that it becomes disjoint from the closure of a page of $\mathcal{OB}$.
Let $L \subset Y$ be a Legendrian submanifold of a contact manifold, $S\subset L$ a framed embedded sphere bounding an isotropic disc $D_S \subset Y \setminus L$, and use $L_S$ to denote the manifold obtained from $L$ by a surgery on $S$. Given some additional conditions on $D_S$ we describe how to obtain a Legendrian embedding of $L_S$ into an arbitrarily small neighbourhood of $L \cup D_S \subset Y$ by a construction that we call Legendrian ambient surgery. In the case when the disc is subcritical, we produce an isomorphism of the Chekanov-Eliashberg algebra of $L_S$ with a version of the Ch…
We give a construction of embedded contact homology (ECH) for a contact $3$-manifold $Y$ with convex sutured boundary and a pair of Legendrians $Λ_+$ and $Λ_-$ contained in $\partial Y$ satisfying an exactness condition. The chain complex is generated by certain configurations of closed Reeb orbits of $Y$ and Reeb chords of $Λ_+$ to $Λ_-$. The main ingredients include: a general Legendrian adjunction formula for curves in $\mathbb{R} \times Y$ with boundary on $\mathbb{R} \times Λ$; a relative writhe bound for curves in contact $3$-manifolds asymptotic to Reeb chords; and a Legendrian ECH inde…
We give a computation of the Legendrian contact homology (LCH) DGA for an arbitrary generic Legendrian surface $L$ in the $1$-jet space of a surface. As input we require a suitable cellular decomposition of the base projection of $L$. A collection of generators is associated to each cell, and the differential is given by explicit matrix formulas. In the present article, we prove that the equivalence class of this cellular DGA does not depend on the choice of decomposition, and in the sequel [35] we use this result to show that the cellular DGA is equivalent to the usual Legendrian contact homo…
The Chekanov-Eliashberg dg-algebra is an algebraic invariant of Legendrian submanifolds of contact manifolds, whose definition recently has been extended to singular Legendrians. We describe a way of constructing simpler models of this dg-algebra for singular Legendrian knots in $\mathbb{R}^{3}$, and give the first examples of singular knots for which the full cohomology can be computed. This includes the $A_{n}$-Legendrians. An important question in the study of the Chekanov-Eliashberg dg-algebra is to understand how its quasi-isomorphism type changes when the Legendrian undergoes Weinstein r…
We show how to orient moduli spaces of holomorphic disks with boundary on an exact Lagrangian immersion of a spin manifold into complex n-space in a coherent manner. This allows us to lift the coefficients of the contact homology of Legendrian spin submanifolds of standard contact (2n+1)-space from Z_2 to Z. We demonstrate how the Z-lift provides a more refined invariant of Legendrian isotopy. We also apply contact homology to produce lower bounds on double points of certain exact Lagrangian immersions into C^n and again including orientations strengthens the results. More precisely, we prove …
This is the first of a series of papers in preparation in which we study the Hamiltonian perturbed contact instantons with Legendrian boundary condition and its applications. In this paper, we prove that the asymptotic charge of contact instantons at the punctures under the Legendrian boundary condition vanishes, which eliminates the phenomenon of the appearance of `spiraling cusp instanton along a Reeb core'. This removes the only remaining obstacle towards the compactification and the Fredholm theory of the moduli space of contact instantons in the open string case, which plagues the closed …
In Part I, we establish nonlinear ellipticity of the equation of contact instantons with Legendrian boundary condition on punctured Riemann surfaces by proving the a priori elliptic coercive estimates for the contact instantons with Legendrian boundary condition, and prove an asymptotic exponential $C^\infty$-convergence result at a puncture under the uniform $C^1$ bound. We prove that the asymptotic charge of contact instantons at the punctures under the Legendrian boundary condition vanishes. This eliminates the phenomenon of the appearance of spiraling cusp instanton along a Reeb core, whic…
In this paper we show that the singular locus of a Legendrian foliation as defined in [Hua13] is a compact submanifold whose connected components are of codimension at most two. As a consequence, given any closed $(n+1)$-dimensional coisotropic submanifold $W$ in a contact $(2n+1)$-manifold, the contact structure in a sufficiently small neighborhood of $W$ is uniquely determined by the characteristic (Legendrian) foliation.
Positive loops of Legendrian embeddings are examined from the point of view of Floer homology of Lagrangian cobordisms. This leads to new obstructions to the existence of a positive loop containing a given Legendrian, expressed in terms of the Legendrian contact homology of the Legendrian submanifold. As applications, old and new examples of orderable contact manifolds are obtained and discussed. We also show that contact manifolds admitting a filling of a Liouville domain with non-zero symplectic homology is strongly orderable in the sense of Liu.
Contact action functional, calculus of variation and canonical generating function of Legendrian submanifolds
Center for Geometry and Physics, Institute for Basic Science (IBS)（基础科学研究所几何物理中心）；POSTECH（浦项科技大学）；CNRS, Laboratoire de Mathématiques Jean Leray, Nantes Université（法国国家科学研究中心让·勒雷数学实验室南特大学）
The study of the Vassiliev invariants of Legendrian knots was started by D. Fuchs and S. Tabachnikov who showed that the groups of complex-valued Vassiliev invariants of Legendrian and of framed knots in the standard contact $R^3$ are canonically isomorphic. Recently we constructed the first examples where Vassiliev invariants of Legendrian and of framed knots are different, and 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 ca…
We show that there exists a Legendrian knot with maximal Thurston-Bennequin invariant whose contact homology is trivial. We also provide another Legendrian knot which has the same knot type and classical invariants but nonvanishing contact homology.
In this paper we study the growth rate of a version of Legendrian contact homology, which we call strip Legendrian contact homology, in 3-dimensional contact manifolds and its relation to the topological entropy of Reeb flows. We show that: if for a pair of Legendrian knots in a contact 3-manifold $(M,ξ)$ the strip Legendrian contact homology is defined and has exponential homotopical growth with respect to the action, then every Reeb flow on $(M,ξ)$ has positive topological entropy. This has the following dynamical consequence: for all Reeb flows (even degenerate ones) on $(M,ξ)$ the number o…
We show that there is no positive loop inside the component of a fiber in the space of Legendrian embeddings in the contact manifold $ST^*M$, provided that the universal cover of $M$ is $\RM^n$. We consider some related results in the space of one-jets of functions on a compact manifold. We give an application to the positive isotopies in homogeneous neighborhoods of surfaces in a tight contact 3-manifold.
We show that all positive contact surgeries on every Legendrian figure-eight knot in $(S^3, ξ_{\rm{std}})$ result in an overtwisted contact structure. The proof uses convex surface theory and invariants from Heegaard Floer homology.
We give a procedure to ``average'' canonically $C^1$-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.
In this paper, we study contact surgeries along Legendrian links in the standard contact 3-sphere. On one hand, we use algebraic methods to prove the vanishing of the contact Ozsváth-Szabó invariant for contact $(+1)$-surgery along certain Legendrian two-component links. The main tool is a link surgery formula for Heegaard Floer homology developed by Manolescu and Ozsváth. On the other hand, we use contact-geometric argument to show the overtwistedness of the contact 3-manifolds obtained by contact $(+1)$-surgeries along Legendrian two-component links whose two components are linked in some sp…
Contact homology for Legendrian submanifolds in standard contact $(2n+1)$-space is rigorously defined using moduli spaces of holomorphic disks with Lagrangian boundary conditions in complex $n$-space. It provides new invariants of Legendrian isotopy. Using these invariants the theory of Legendrian isotopy is shown to be very rich. For example, infinite families of pairwise non-isotopic Legendrian $n$-spheres and $n$-tori, which are indistinguishable by means of previously known invariants, are constructed. In a sense, the definition of contact homology presented in this paper is a high dimensi…
In this note, we classify Stein fillings of an infinite family of contact 3-manifolds up to diffeomorphism. Some contact 3-manifolds in this family can be obtained by Legendrian surgeries on $(S^3,ξ_{std})$ along certain Legendrian 2-bridge knots. We also classify Stein fillings, up to symplectic deformation, of an infinite family of contact 3-manifolds which can be obtained by Legendrian surgeries on $(S^3,ξ_{std})$ along certain Legendrian twist knots. As a corollary, we obtain a classification of Stein fillings of an infinite family of contact hyperbolic 3-manifolds up to symplectic deforma…
The main result of this paper is that, off of a `fundamental class' in degree 1, the linearized Legendrian contact homology obeys a version of Poincare duality between homology groups in degrees k and -k. Not only does the result itself simplify calculations, but its proof also establishes a framework for analyzing cohomology operations on the linearized Legendrian contact homology.
We give a combinatorial description of the Legendrian differential graded algebra associated to a Legendrian knot in PxR, where P is a punctured Riemann surface. As an application we show that for any integer k and any homology class h in H_1(PxR) there are k Legendrian knots all representing h which are pairwise smoothly isotopic through a formal Legendrian isotopy but which lie in mutually distinct Legendrian isotopy classes.
An exact Lagrangian submanifold $L$ in the symplectization of standard contact $(2n-1)$-space with Legendrian boundary $Σ$ can be glued to itself along $Σ$. This gives a Legendrian embedding $Λ(L,L)$ of the double of $L$ into contact $(2n+1)$-space. We show that the Legendrian isotopy class of $Λ(L,L)$ is determined by formal data: the manifold $L$ together with a trivialization of its complexified tangent bundle. In particular, if $L$ is a disk then $Λ(L,L)$ is the Legendrian unknot.
A Legendrian or transverse knot in an overtwisted contact 3-manifold is non-loose if its complement is tight and loose if its complement is overtwisted. We define three measures of the extent of non-looseness of a non-loose knot and show they are distinct.
In this paper we study a subspace of the space of Legendrian loops and we show that the injection of this space into the full loop space is an S1-equivariant homotopy equivalence. This space can be also seen as the space of zero Maslov index Legendrian loops and it shows up as a suitable space of variations in contact form geometry.
Laudenbach and Sikorav proved that closed, half-dimensional non-Lagrangian submanifolds of symplectic manifolds are immediately displaceable as long as there is no topological obstruction. From this they deduced that the $C^0$-limit of a sequence of Lagrangian submanifolds of certain manifolds is again Lagrangian, provided that the limit is smooth. In this note we extend Laudenbach and Sikorav's ideas to contact manifolds. We prove correspondingly that certain non-Legendrian submanifolds of contact manifolds can be displaced immediately without creating short Reeb chords as long as there is no…
We derive constraints on Lagrangian concordances from Legendrian submanifolds of the standard contact sphere admitting exact Lagrangian fillings. More precisely, we show that such a concordance induces an isomorphism on the level of bilinearised Legendrian contact cohomology. This is used to prove the existence of non-invertible exact Lagrangian concordances in all dimensions. In addition, using a result of Eliashberg-Polterovich, we completely classify exact Lagrangian concordances from the Legendrian unknot to itself in the tight contact-three sphere: every such concordance is the trace of a…
