We consider convex contact spheres $Y$ all of whose Reeb orbits are closed. Any such $Y$ admits a stratification by the periods of closed Reeb orbits. We show that $Y$ "resembles" a contact ellipsoid: any stratum of $Y$ is an integral homology sphere, and the sequence of Ekeland-Hofer spectral invariants of $Y$ coincides with the full sequence of action values, each one repeated according to its multiplicity.
A closed contact manifold is called Besse when all its Reeb orbits are closed, and Zoll when they have the same minimal period. In this paper, we provide a characterization of Besse contact forms for convex contact spheres and Riemannian unit tangent bundles in terms of $S^1$-equivariant spectral invariants. Furthermore, for restricted contact type hypersurfaces of symplectic Euclidean spaces, we give a sufficient condition for the Besse property via the Ekeland-Hofer capacities.
A contact form is called Besse when the associated Reeb flow is periodic. We prove that Besse contact forms on closed connected 3-manifolds are the local maximizers of suitable higher systolic ratios. Our result extends earlier ones for Zoll contact forms, that is, contact forms whose Reeb flow defines a free circle action.
A taut contact sphere on a 3-manifold is a linear 2-sphere of contact forms, all defining the same volume form. In the present paper we completely determine the moduli of taut contact spheres on compact left-quotients of SU(2) (the only closed manifolds admitting such structures). We also show that the moduli space of taut contact spheres embeds into the moduli space of taut contact circles. This moduli problem leads to a new viewpoint on the Gibbons-Hawking ansatz in hyperkahler geometry. The classification of taut contact spheres on closed 3-manifolds includes the known classification of 3-S…
Given any smooth fibration of the unit 3-sphere by great circles, we show that the distribution of 2-planes orthogonal to the great circle fibres is a tight contact structure, a fact well known in the special case of the Hopf fibrations. The proof expresses hypothesis and conclusion as differential inequalities involving functions on disks transverse to the fibres, and shows that one inequality implies the other.
Given a closed contact 3-manifold with a compatible Riemannian metric, we show that if the sectional curvature is 1/4-pinched, then the contact structure is universally tight. This result improves the Contact Sphere Theorem in [EKM12], where a 4/9-pinching constant was imposed. Some tightness results on positively curved contact open 3-manifold are also discussed.
We prove that the group of strict contactomorphisms of the standard tight contact structure on the three-sphere deformation retracts to its unitary subgroup U(2).
We prove some open book embedding results in the contact category. For example, we show that a large class of contact 3-manifolds admit contact open book embedding in the standard contact 5- sphere. We also prove that all the Ustilovsky (4m + 1)-spheres contact open book embed in the standard contact (4m + 3)-sphere.
In this paper we study the groups of contactomorphisms of a closed contact manifold from a topological viewpoint. First we construct examples of contact forms on spheres whose Reeb flow has a dense orbit. Then we show that the unitary group U(n+1) is homotopically essential in the group of contactomorphisms of the standard contact sphere S^(2n+1) and prove that in the case of the 3-sphere the contactomorphism group is in fact homotopy equivalent to U(2). In the second part of the paper we focus on the group of strict contactomorphisms -- using the framework of Chern-Weil theory we introduce an…
We show the existence of elements of infinite order in some homotopy groups of the contactomorphism group of overtwisted spheres. It follows in particular that the contactomorphism group of some high dimensional overtwisted spheres is not homotopically equivalent to a finite dimensional Lie group.
In this paper, sufficient conditions for contact $(+1)$-surgeries along Legendrian knots in contact rational homology 3-spheres to have vanishing contact invariants or to be overtwisted are given. They can be applied to study contact $(\pm1)$-surgeries along Legendrian links in the standard contact 3-sphere. We also obtain a sufficient condition for contact $(+1)$-surgeries along Legendrian two-component links in the standard contact 3-sphere to be overtwisted via their front projections.
We show that Brieskorn manifolds with their standard contact structures are contact branched coverings of spheres. This covering maps a contact open book decomposition of the Brieskorn manifold onto a Milnor open book of the sphere.
In this paper we study embeddings of contact manifolds using braidings of one manifold about another. In particular we show how to embed many contact 3-manifolds into the standard contact 5-sphere. We also show how to obstruct braidings of one manifold about another using contact geometry.
In this short note, we exhibit an infinite family of hyperbolic rational homology $3$--spheres which do not admit any fillable contact structures. We also note that most of these manifolds do admit tight contact structures.
The systolic ratio of a contact form $α$ on the three-sphere is the quantity \[ ρ_{\mathrm{sys}}(α) = \frac{T_{\min}(α)^2}{\mathrm{vol}(S^3,α\wedge dα)}, \] where $T_{\min}(α)$ is the minimal period of closed Reeb orbits on $(S^3,α)$. A Zoll contact form is a contact form such that all the orbits of the corresponding Reeb flow are closed and have the same period. Our first main result is that $ρ_{\mathrm{sys}}\leq 1$ in a neighbourhood of the space of Zoll contact forms on $S^3$, with equality holding precisely at Zoll contact forms. This implies a particular case of a conjecture of Viterbo, a…
We prove the existence of exotic but homotopically trivial contact structures on spheres of dimension 8k-1. Together with previous results of Eliashberg and the second author this establishes the existence of such structures on all odd-dimensional spheres (of dimension at least 3).
A point q in a contact manifold is called a translated point for a contactomorphism ϕ, with respect to some fixed contact form, if ϕ(q) and q belong to the same Reeb orbit and the contact form is preserved at q. In this article we discuss a version of the Arnold conjecture for translated points of contactomorphisms and, using generating functions techniques, we prove it in the case of spheres (under a genericity assumption) and projective spaces.
We construct a dynamically convex contact form on the three-sphere whose systolic ratio is arbitrarily close to 2. This example is related to a conjecture of Viterbo, whose validity would imply that the systolic ratio of a convex contact form does not exceed 1. We also construct a sequence of tight contact forms $α_n$, $n\geq 2$, with systolic ratio arbitrarily close to $n$ and suitable bounds on the mean rotation number of all the closed orbits of the induced Reeb flow.
In this note we introduce the (homologically essential) arc complex of a surface as a tool for studying properties of open book decompositions and contact structures. After characterizing destabilizability in terms of the essential translation distance of the monodromy of an open book we given an application of this result to show that there are planer open books of the standard contact structure on the 3-sphere with 5 (or any number larger than 5) boundary components that do not destabilize. We also show that any planar open book with 4 or fewer boundary components does destabilize.
We prove the non--triviality of the Reeb flow for the (2n+1)--dimensional standard contact spheres inside the fundamental group of their contactomorphism group, n greater than 3. The argument uses the existence of homotopically non--trivial 2--spheres in the space of contact structures of a 3--Sasakian manifold.
We exhibit the first examples of contact structures on $S^{2n-1}$ with $n\geq 4$ and on $S^3\times S^2$, all equipped with their standard smooth structures, for which every Reeb flow has positive topological entropy. As a new technical tool for the study of the volume growth of Reeb flows we introduce the notion of algebraic growth of wrapped Floer homology. Its power stems from its stability under several geometric operations on Liouville domains.
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.
The main theme of this paper is the dynamics of Reeb flows with symmetries on the standard contact sphere. We introduce the notion of strong dynamical convexity for contact forms invariant under a group action, supporting the standard contact structure, and prove that in dimension $2n+1$ any such contact form satisfying a condition slightly weaker than strong dynamical convexity has at least $n+1$ simple closed Reeb orbits. For contact forms with antipodal symmetry, we prove that strong dynamical convexity is a consequence of ordinary convexity. In dimension five or greater, we construct examp…
In this note we show that a closed oriented contact manifold is obtained from the standard contact sphere of the same dimension by contact surgeries on isotropic and coisotropic spheres. In addition, we observe that all closed oriented contact manifolds admit symplectic caps.
Let S be a compact surface - or the interior of a compact surface - and let V be the manifold of cooriented contact elements of S equiped with its canonical contact structure. A diffeomorphism of V that preserves the contact structure and its coorientation is called a contact transformation over S. We prove the following results. 1) If S is neither a sphere nor a torus then the inclusion of the diffeomorphism group of S into the contact transformation group is 0-connected. 2) If S is a sphere then the contact transformation group is connected. 3) if S is a torus then the homomorphism from the …
We introduce a new method to obstruct Liouville and weak fillability. Using this, we show that various rational homology 3-spheres admit strongly fillable contact structures without Liouville fillings, which extends the result of Ghiggini on a family of Brieskorn spheres. We also make partial progress on a conjecture of Ghiggini and Van-Horn-Morris.
We show that a nondegenerate tight contact form on the 3-sphere has exactly two simple closed Reeb orbits if and only if the differential in linearized contact homology vanishes. Moreover, in this case the Floquet multipliers and Conley-Zehnder indices of the two Reeb orbits agree with those of a suitable irrational ellipsoid in 4-space.
In this paper we construct the Floer homology for an action functional which was introduced by Rabinowitz and prove a vanishing theorem. As an application, we show that there are no displaceable exact contact embeddings of the unit cotangent bundle of a sphere of dimension greater than three into a convex exact symplectic manifold with vanishing first Chern class. This generalizes Gromov's result that there are no exact Lagrangian embeddings of a sphere into a complex vector space.
We consider Reeb dynamics on the 3-sphere associated to a tight contact form. Our main result gives necessary and sufficient conditions for a periodic Reeb orbit to bound a disk-like global section for the Reeb flow, when the contact form is assumed to be non-degenerate.
A positive contactomorphism of a contact manifold $M$ is the end point of a contact isotopy on $M$ that is always positively transverse to the contact structure. Assume that $M$ contains a Legendrian sphere $Λ$, and that $(M,Λ)$ is fillable by a Liouville domain $(W,ω)$ with exact Lagrangian $L$ such that $ω|_{π_2(W,L)}=0$. We show that if the exponential growth of the action filtered wrapped Floer homology of $(W,L)$ is positive, then every positive contactomorphism of $M$ has positive topological entropy. This result generalizes the result of Alves and Meiwes from Reeb flows to positive cont…
In this paper we give some positive and negative results about the contact property for the energy levels $Σ_c$ of a symplectic magnetic field on $S^2$. In the first part we focus on the case of the area form on a surface of revolution. We state a sufficient condition for an energy level to be of contact type and give an example where the contact property fails. If the magnetic curvature is positive, the dynamics and the action of invariant measures can be numerically computed. This hints at the conjecture that an energy level of a symplectic magnetic field with positive magnetic curvature sho…
We study non-degenerate Reeb flows arising from perfect contact forms, i.e., the forms with vanishing contact homology differential. In particular, we obtain upper bounds on the number of simple closed Reeb orbits for such forms on a variety of contact manifolds and certain action-index resonance relations for the standard contact sphere. Using these results, we reprove a theorem due to Bourgeois, Cieliebak and Ekholm characterizing perfect Reeb flows on the standard contact three-sphere as non-degenerate Reeb flows with exactly two simple closed orbits.
Given a transverse link in the standard contact 3-sphere, we study the contact manifold that arises as a branched double cover of the sphere. We give a contact surgery description of such manifolds, which allows to determine the Heegaard Floer contact invariants for some of them. By example of the knots of Birman--Menasco, we show that these contact manifolds may fail to distinguish between non-isotopic transverse knots. We also investigate the relation between the Heegaard Floer contact invariants of the branched double covers and the Khovanov homology, in particular, the transverse link inva…
We prove various results on contact structures obtained by contact surgery on a single Legendrian knot in the standard contact three--sphere. Our main tool are the contact Ozsvath--Szabo invariants.
We show that the existence of one simple closed Reeb orbit of a particular type (a symplectically degenerate maximum) forces the Reeb flow to have infinitely many periodic orbits. We use this result to give a different proof of a recent theorem of Cristofaro-Gardiner and Hutchings asserting that every Reeb flow on the standard contact three-sphere has at least two periodic orbits. Our methods are based on adapting the machinery originally developed for proving the Hamiltonian Conley conjecture to the contact setting.
We characterize L-spaces which are Seifert fibered over the 2-sphere in terms of taut foliations, transverse foliations and transverse contact structures. We give a sufficient condition for certain contact Seifert fibered 3-manifolds with e_0=-1 to have nonzero contact Ozsvath--Szabo invariants. This yields an algorithm for deciding whether a given small Seifert fibered L-space carries a contact structure with nonvanishing contact Ozsvath--Szabo invariant. As an application, we prove the existence of tight contact structures on some 3-manifolds obtained by integral surgery along a positive tor…
We use Lerman's contact cut construction to find a sufficient condition for Hamiltonian diffeomorphisms of compact surfaces to embed into a closed 3-manifold as Poincaré return maps on a global surface of section for a Reeb flow. In particular, we show that the irrational pseudorotations of the 2-disc constructed by Fayad-Katok embed into the Reeb flow of a dynamically convex contact form on the 3-sphere.
We show that on any closed contact manifold of dimension greater than 1 a contact structure with vanishing contact homology can be constructed. The basic idea for the construction comes from Giroux. We use a special open book decomposition for spheres. The page is the cotangent bundle of a sphere and the monodromy is given by a left-handed Dehn twist. In the resulting contact manifold we exhibit a closed Reeb orbit that bounds a single finite energy plane. As a result, the unit element of the contact homology algebra is exact and so the contact homology vanishes. This result can be extended to…
We construct a family of Stein fillable contact homology 3-spheres such that each contact structure of the family is supported by an open book with planar page, and a Stein filling of the contact manifold is of Mazur type.
In two previous papers, the two first-named authors introduced a notion of contact r-surgery along Legendrian knots in contact 3-manifolds. They also showed how (at least in principle) to convert any contact r-surgery into a sequence of contact plus or minus 1 surgeries, and used this to prove that any (closed) contact 3-manifold can be obtained from the standard contact structure on the 3-sphere by a sequence of such surgeries. In the present paper, we give a shorter proof of that result and a more explicit algorithm for turning a contact r-surgery into plus or minus 1 surgeries. We use this …
If a Legendrian knot $Λ$ in the standard contact 3-sphere bounds an orientable exact Lagrangian surface $Σ$ in the standard symplectic 4-ball, then the genus of $Σ$ is equal to the slice genus of (the smooth knot underlying) $Λ$, the sum of the Thurston-Bennequin number of L and the Euler characteristic of $Σ$ is zero as well as the rotation number of $Λ$, and moreover, the linearized contact homology of $Λ$ with respect to the augmentation induced by $Σ$ is isomorphic to the (singular) homology of $Σ$. It was asked in arXiv:1212.1519 whether the converse of this statement is true. We give a n…
