We investigate the interactions between the Legendrian satellite construction and the existence of exact, orientable Lagrangian cobordisms between Legendrian knots. Given Lagrangian cobordisms between two Legendrian knots and between two Legendrian tangles, we construct a Lagrangian cobordism between Legendrian satellites of the knots by the closures of the tangles, with extra twists on both the top and the bottom satellite to compensate for the genus of the cobordism. If the original cobordisms were decomposable, then a decomposable cobordism between satellites exists as well, again with extra twists.
We prove a Seifert-van Kampen theorem for Legendrian submanifolds and exact Lagrangian cobordisms, and use it to calculate the change in the DGA caused by critical Legendrian ambient surgery.
To investigate the rigidity and flexibility of Lagrangian cobordisms between Legendrian submanifolds, we investigate the minimal length of such a cobordism, which is a $1$-dimensional measurement of the non-cylindrical portion of the cobordism. Our primary tool is a set of real-valued capacities for a Legendrian submanifold, which are derived from a filtered version of Legendrian Contact Homology. Relationships between capacities of Legendrians at the ends of a Lagrangian cobordism yield lower bounds on the length of the cobordism. We apply the capacities to Lagrangian cobordisms realizing ver…
This note concerns Legendrian cobordisms in one-jet spaces of functions, in the sense of Arnol'd \cite{Arnold} -- consisting of big Legendrian submanifolds between two smaller ones. We are interested in such cobordisms which fit with generating functions, and wonder which structures and obstructions come with this notion. As a central result, we show that the classes of Legendrian concordances with respect to the generating function equipment can be given a group structure. To this construction we add one of a homotopy with respect to generating functions.
Let $Λ, Λ'$ be a pair of closed Legendrian submanifolds in a closed contact manifold $(Y, ξ= Ker(α))$ related by a Legendrian cobordism $W\subset (\mathbb{C}\times Y, \tildeξ=Ker(-y dx +α))$. In this note, we show that in the hypertight setting, if $Λ$ intersects a closed, weakly exact or monotone pre-Lagrangian $P\subset Y$ for reasons of Floer homology, then so does $Λ'$.
We consider Legendrian links and tangles in $J^1S^1$ and $J^1[0,1]$ equipped with Morse complex families over a field $\mathbb{F}$ and classify them up to Legendrian cobordism. When the coefficient field is $\mathbb{F}_2$ this provides a cobordism classification for Legendrians equipped with augmentations of the Legendrian contact homology DG-algebras. A complete set of invariants, for which arbitrary values may be obtained, is provided by the fiber cohomology, a graded monodromy matrix, and a mod $2$ spin number. We apply the classification to construct augmented Legendrian surfaces in $J^1M$…
We study the relation of an embedded Lagrangian cobordism between two closed, orientable Legendrian submanifolds of R^{2n+1}. More precisely, we investigate the behavior of the Thurston-Bennequin number and (linearized) Legendrian contact homology under this relation. The result about the Thurston-Bennequin number can be considered as a generalization of the result of Chantraine which holds when n = 1. In addition, we provide a few constructions of Lagrangian cobordisms and prove that there are infinitely many pairs of exact Lagrangian cobordant and not pairwise Legendrian isotopic Legendrian …
For $1$-dimensional Legendrian submanifolds of $1$-jet spaces, we extend the functorality of the Legendrian contact homology DG-algebra (DGA) from embedded exact Lagrangian cobordisms, as in \cite{EHK}, to a class of immersed exact Lagrangian cobordisms by considering their Legendrian lifts as conical Legendrian cobordisms. To a conical Legendrian cobordism $Σ$ from $Λ_-$ to $Λ_+$, we associate an immersed DGA map, which is a diagram $$\alg(Λ_+) \stackrel{f}{\rightarrow} \alg(Σ) \stackrel{i}{\hookleftarrow} \alg(Λ_-), $$ where $f$ is a DGA map and $i$ is an inclusion map. This construction giv…
We obtain upper and lower bounds for the relative Gromov width of Lagrangian cobordisms between Legendrian submanifolds. Upper bounds arise from the existence of $J$-holomorphic disks with boundary on the Lagrangian cobordism that pass through the center of any given symplectically embedded ball. The areas of these disks --- and hence the sizes of these balls --- are controlled by a real-valued fundamental capacity, a quantity derived from the algebraic structure of filtered linearized Legendrian Contact Homology of the Legendrian at the top of the cobordism. Lower bounds come from explicit co…
We introduce constructions of exact Lagrangian cobordisms with cylindrical Legendrian ends and study their invariants which arise from Symplectic Field Theory. A pair $(X,L)$ consisting of an exact symplectic manifold $X$ and an exact Lagrangian cobordism $L\subset X$ which agrees with cylinders over Legendrian links $Λ_+$ and $Λ_-$ at the positive and negative ends induces a differential graded algebra (DGA) map from the Legendrian contact homology DGA of $Λ_+$ to that of $Λ_-$. We give a gradient flow tree description of the DGA maps for certain pairs $(X,L)$, which in turn yields a purely c…
We prove that the LOSS and GRID invariants of Legendrian links in knot Floer homology behave in certain functorial ways with respect to decomposable Lagrangian cobordisms in the symplectization of the standard contact structure on $\mathbb{R}^3$. Our results give new, computable, and effective obstructions to the existence of such cobordisms.
In the symplectization of standard contact $3$-space, $\mathbb R \times \mathbb R^3$, it is known that an orientable Lagrangian cobordism between a Legendrian knot and itself, also known as an orientable Lagrangian endocobordism for the Legendrian knot, must have genus $0$. We show that any Legendrian knot has a non-orientable Lagrangian endocobordism, and that the crosscap genus of such a non-orientable Lagrangian endocobordism must be a positive multiple of $4$. The more restrictive exact, non-orientable Lagrangian endocobordisms do not exist for any exactly fillable Legendrian knot but do e…
We investigate the ramifications of the Legendrian satellite construction on the relation of Lagrangian cobordism between Legendrian knots. Under a simple hypothesis, we construct a Lagrangian concordance between two Legendrian satellites by stacking up a sequence of elementary cobordisms. This construction narrows the search for "non-decomposable" Lagrangian cobordisms and yields new families of decomposable Lagrangian slice knots. Finally, we show that the maximum Thurston-Bennequin number of a smoothly slice knot provides an obstruction to any Legendrian satellite of that knot being Lagrang…
Embedded Lagrangian cobordisms between Legendrian submanifolds are produced from isotopy, spinning, and handle attachment constructions that employ the technique of generating families. Moreover, any Legendrian with a generating family has an immersed Lagrangian filling with a compatible generating family. These constructions are applied in several directions, in particular to a non-classical geography question: any graded group satisfying a duality condition can be realized as the generating family homology of a connected Legendrian submanifold in R^{2n+1} or in the 1-jet space of any compact…
The technique of generating families produces obstructions to the existence of embedded Lagrangian cobordisms between Legendrian submanifolds in the symplectizations of 1-jet bundles. In fact, generating families may be used to construct a TQFT-like theory that, in addition to giving the aforementioned obstructions, yield structural information about invariants of Legendrian submanifolds. For example, the obstructions devised in this paper show that there is no generating family compatible Lagrangian cobordism between the Chekanov-Eliashberg Legendrian $m(5_2)$ knots. Further, the generating f…
We provide in this note two relevant examples of Lagrangian cobordisms. The first one gives an example of two exact Lagrangian submanifolds which cannot be composed in an exact fashion. The second one is an example of an exact Lagrangian cobordism on which all primitive of the Liouville form is not constant on the negative end and such that the positive end is a stabilisation whereas the negative end admits augmentations. These examples emphasise point (i) of the definition of exact Lagrangian cobordisms in [6]. In order to provide such examples we construct Lagrangian immersions with single d…
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…
Lagrangian cobordisms between Legendrian knots arise in Symplectic Field Theory and impose an interesting and not well-understood relation on Legendrian knots. There are some known "elementary" building blocks for Lagrangian cobordisms that are smoothly the attachment of $0$- and $1$-handles. An important question is whether every pair of non-empty Legendrians that are related by a connected Lagrangian cobordism can be related by a ribbon Lagrangian cobordism, in particular one that is "decomposable" into a composition of these elementary building blocks. We will describe these and other combi…
We construct a version of rational Symplectic Field Theory for pairs $(X,L)$, where $X$ is an exact symplectic manifold, where $L\subset X$ is an exact Lagrangian submanifold with components subdivided into $k$ subsets, and where both $X$ and $L$ have cylindrical ends. The theory associates to $(X,L)$ a $\Z$-graded chain complex of vector spaces over $\Z_2$, filtered with $k$ filtration levels. The corresponding $k$-level spectral sequence is invariant under deformations of $(X,L)$ and has the following property: if $(X,L)$ is obtained by joining a negative end of a pair $(X',L')$ to a positiv…
Let $L \subset \mathbb R \times J^1(M)$ be a spin, exact Lagrangian cobordism in the symplectization of the 1-jet space of a smooth manifold $M$. Assume that $L$ has cylindrical Legendrian ends $Λ_\pm \subset J^1(M)$. It is well known that the Legendrian contact homology of $Λ_\pm$ can be defined with integer coefficients, via a signed count of pseudo-holomorphic disks in the cotangent bundle of $M$. It is also known that this count can be lifted to a mod 2 count of pseudo-holomorphic disks in the symplectization $\mathbb R \times J^1(M)$, and that $L$ induces a morphism between the $\mathbb Z…
To a Legendrian knot, one can associate an $\mathcal{A}_{\infty}$ category, the augmentation category. An exact Lagrangian cobordism between two Legendrian knots gives a functor of the augmentation categories of the two knots. We study the functor and establish a long exact sequence relating the corresponding cohomology of morphisms of the two ends. As applications, we prove that the functor between augmentation categories is injective on the level of equivalence classes of objects and find new obstructions to the existence of exact Lagrangian cobordisms in terms of linearized contact homology…
We show that a quasipositive surface with disconnected boundary induces a map between the knot Floer homology groups of its boundary components preserving the transverse invariant. As an application, we show that this invariant can be used to obstruct decomposable Lagrangian cobordisms of arbitrary genus within Weinstein cobordisms. The construction of our maps rely on the comultiplicativity of the transverse invariant. Along the way, we also recover various naturality statements for the invariant under contact +1 surgery.
We prove that any Legendrian knot in $(S^3,ξ_{std})$ bounds an exact Lagrangian surface in $\mathbb{R}^4\setminus B^4$ after a sufficient number of stabilizations. In order to show this, we construct a family combinatorial moves on knot projections with some additional data that correspond to Lagrangian cobordisms between knots.
For a Legendrian link $Λ\subset J^1M$ with $M = \mathbb{R}$ or $S^1$, immersed exact Lagrangian fillings $L \subset \mbox{Symp}(J^1M) \cong T^*(\mathbb{R}_{>0} \times M)$ of $Λ$ can be lifted to conical Legendrian fillings $Σ\subset J^1(\mathbb{R}_{>0} \times M)$ of $Λ$. When $Σ$ is embedded, using the version of functoriality for Legendrian contact homology (LCH) from [30], for each augmentation $α: \mathcal{A}(Σ) \rightarrow \mathbb{Z}/2$ of the LCH algebra of $Σ$, there is an induced augmentation $ε_{(Σ,α)}: \mathcal{A}(Λ) \rightarrow \mathbb{Z}/2$. With $Σ$ fixed, the set of homotopy class…
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…
We define a unital $A_\infty$-category whose objects are exact Lagrangian cobordisms in the symplectization of $Y=P\times\mathbb{R}$, with negative cylindrical ends over Legendrians equipped with augmentations. The morphism spaces are given in terms of Floer complexes $Cth_+(Σ_0,Σ_1)$ which are versions of the Rabinowitz Floer complex defined by Symplectic Field Theory (SFT) techniques.
Given an immersed, Maslov-$0$, exact Lagrangian filling of a Legendrian knot, if the filling has a vanishing index and action double point, then through Lagrangian surgery it is possible to obtain a new immersed, Maslov-$0$, exact Lagrangian filling with one less double point and with genus increased by one. We show that it is not always possible to reverse the Lagrangian surgery: not every immersed, Maslov-$0$, exact Lagrangian filling with genus $g \geq 1$ and $p$ double points can be obtained from such a Lagrangian surgery on a filling of genus $g-1$ with $p+1$ double points. To show this, …
We construct a product on the Floer complex associated to a pair of Lagrangian cobordisms. More precisely, given three exact transverse Lagrangian cobordisms in the symplectization of a contact manifold, we define a map $\mathfrak{m}_2$ by a count of rigid pseudo-holomorphic disks with boundary on the cobordisms and having punctures asymptotic to intersection points and Reeb chords of the negative Legendrian ends of the cobordisms. More generally, to a $(d+1)$-tuple of exact transverse Lagrangian cobordisms we associate a map $\mathfrak{m}_d$ such that the family $(\mathfrak{m}_d)_{d\geq1}$ ar…
We show that an exact Lagrangian cobordism $L\subset \mathbb R \times P \times \mathbb R$ from a Legendrian submanifold $Λ\subset P\times \mathbb R$ to itself satisfies $H_i(L;\mathbb F)=H_i(Λ;\mathbb F)$ for any field $\mathbb F$ in the case when $Λ$ admits a spin exact Lagrangian filling and the concatenation of any spin exact Lagrangian filling of $Λ$ and $L$ is also spin. The main tool used is Seidel's isomorphism in wrapped Floer homology. In contrast to that, for loose Legendrian submanifolds of $\mathbb{C}^n \times \mathbb R$, we construct examples of such cobordisms whose homology grou…
The purpose of this note is to show that classical cobordism arguments, which go back to the pioneering works of Mandelbaum and Moishezon, provide quick and unified proofs of any knot surgered compact simply-connected 4-manifold X_K becoming diffeomorphic to X after a single stabilization by connected summing with S^2 x S^2 or CP^2 # -CP^2, and almost complete decomposability of X_K for many almost completely decomposable X, such as the elliptic surfaces.
We investigate when a Legendrian knot in standard contact $\mathbb{R}^3$ has a non-orientable exact Lagrangian filling. We prove analogs of several results in the orientable setting, develop new combinatorial obstructions to fillability, and determine when several families of knots have such fillings. In particular, we determine completely when an alternating knot (and more generally a plus-adequate knot) is decomposably non-orientably fillable, and classify the fillability of most torus and 3-strand pretzel knots. We also describe rigidity phenomena of decomposable non-orientable fillings, in…
This paper and its sequel prove that every Legendrian knot in a closed three-manifold with a contact form has a Reeb chord. The present paper deduces this result from another theorem, asserting that an exact symplectic cobordism between contact 3-manifolds induces a map on (filtered) embedded contact homology satisfying certain axioms. The latter theorem will be proved in the sequel using Seiberg-Witten theory.
We study a class of Legendrian surfaces in contact five-folds by encoding their wavefronts via planar combinatorial structures. We refer to these surfaces as Legendrian weaves, and to the combinatorial objects as N-graphs. First, we develop a diagrammatic calculus which encodes contact geometric operations on Legendrian surfaces as multi-colored planar combinatorics. Second, we present an algebraic-geometric characterization for the moduli space of microlocal constructible sheaves associated to these Legendrian surfaces. Then we use these N-graphs and the flag moduli description of these Legen…
We show that the EH class and the LOSS invariant of Legendrian knots in contact 3-manifolds are functorial under regular Lagrangian concordances in Weinstein cobordisms. This gives computable obstructions to the existence of regular Lagrangian concordances.
Let $Λ$ be a Legendrian in the jet space of some manifold $X$. To a generating family presentation of $Λ$, we associate a constructible sheaf on $X \times \mathbb{R}$ whose singular support at infinity is $Λ$, and such that the generating family homology is canonically isomorphic to the endomorphism algebra of this sheaf. That is, the theory of generating family homology embeds in sheaf theory, and more specifically in the category studied in [STZ]. When $X = \mathbb{R}$, i.e., for the theory of Legendrian knots and links in the standard contact $\mathbb{R}^3$, we use ideas from the proof of t…
For a nullhomologous Legendrian knot in a closed contact 3-manifold Y we consider a contact structure obtained by positive rational contact surgery. We prove that in this situation the Heegaard Floer contact invariant of Y is mapped by a surgery cobordism to the contact invariant of the result of contact surgery. In addition we characterize the spin-c structure on the cobordism that induces the relevant map. As a consequence we determine necessary and sufficient conditions for the nonvanishing of the contact invariant after rational surgery when Y is the standard 3-sphere, generalizing previou…
