Using contact homology, we reobtain some recent results of Geiges and Gonzalo about the fundamental group of the space of contact structures on some 3-manifolds. We show that our techniques can be used to study higher dimensional contact manifolds and higher order homotopy groups.
For a closed oriented 3-manifold Y, we define an absolute grading on the Heegaard Floer homology groups of Y by homotopy classes of oriented 2-plane fields. We show that this absolute grading refines the relative one and that it is compatible with the maps induced by cobordisms. We also prove that if ξ is a contact structure on Y, then the grading of the contact invariant c(ξ) is the homotopy class of ξ.
Knot contact homology is an invariant of knots derived from Legendrian contact homology which has numerous connections to the knot group. We use basic properties of knot groups to prove that knot contact homology detects every torus knot. Further, if the knot contact homology of a knot is isomorphic to that of a cable (respectively composite) knot, then the knot is a cable (respectively composite).
We present three equivalent definitions of $S^1$-equivariant symplectic homology. We show that, using rational coefficients, the positive part of $S^1$-equivariant symplectic homology is isomorphic to linearized contact homology, when the latter is defined. We present several computations and applications, and introduce a rigorously defined substitute for cylindrical/linearized contact homology based on an $S^1$-equivariant construction.
This paper is the sequel to "The equivalence of Heegaard Floer homology and embedded contact homology via open book decompositions I" and is devoted to proving some of the technical parts of the HF=ECH isomorphism.
This article is a survey on the authors' proof of the isomorphism between Heegaard Floer homology and embedded contact homology appeared in This article is a survey on the authors' proof of the isomorphism between Heegaard Floer homology and embedded contact homology appeared in arXiv:1208.1074, arXiv:1208.1077 and arXiv:1208.1526.
We use contact handle decompositions and a stabilization process to compute the cylindrical contact homology of a subcritical Stein-fillable contact manifold with vanishing first Chern class, and show that it is completely determined by the homology of a subcritical Stein-filling of the contact manifold.
In principle, Floer theory can be extended to define homotopy invariants of families of equivalent objects (e.g. Hamiltonian isotopic symplectomorphisms, 3-manifolds, Legendrian knots, etc.) parametrized by a smooth manifold B. The invariant of a family consists of a filtered chain homotopy type, which gives rise to a spectral sequence whose E^2 term is the homology of B with twisted coefficients in the Floer homology of the fibers. The filtered chain homotopy type also gives rise to a "family Floer homology" to which the spectral sequence converges. For any particular version of Floer theory,…
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.
Given a closed oriented 3-manifold M, we establish an isomorphism between the Heegaard Floer homology group HF^+(-M) and the embedded contact homology group ECH(M). Starting from an open book decomposition (S,h) of M, we construct a chain map Φ^+ from a Heegaard Floer chain complex associated to (S,h) to an embedded contact homology chain complex for a contact form supported by (S,h). The chain map Φ^+ commutes up to homotopy with the U-maps defined on both sides and reduces to the quasi-isomorphism Φfrom "The equivalence of Heegaard Floer homology and embedded contact homology I, II" on subco…
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.
Given an open book decomposition (S,h) adapted to a closed, oriented 3-manifold M, we define a chain map from a certain Heegaard Floer chain complex associated to (S,h) to a certain embedded contact homology chain complex associated to (S,h), as defined in arXiv:1008.2734, and prove that it induces an isomorphism on the level of homology. This implies the isomorphism between the hat version of Heegaard Floer homology of -M and the hat version of embedded contact homology of M.
This is the first of five papers that construct an isomorphism between the embedded contact homology and Seiberg-Witten Floer cohomology of a compact 3-manifold with a given contact 1-form. This paper describes what is involved in the construction.
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.
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 give a combinatorial description of the Legendrian contact homology algebra associated to a Legendrian link in $S^1\times S^2$ or any connected sum $\#^k(S^1\times S^2)$, viewed as the contact boundary of the Weinstein manifold obtained by attaching 1-handles to the 4-ball. In view of the surgery formula for symplectic homology, this gives a combinatorial description of the symplectic homology of any 4-dimensional Weinstein manifold (and of the linearized contact homology of its boundary). We also study examples and discuss the invariance of the Legendrian homology algebra under deformation…
We define the reduced Khovanov homology of an open book (S,h), and we identify a distinguished "contact element" in this group which may be used to establish the tightness or non-fillability of contact structures compatible with (S,h). Our construction generalizes the relationship between the reduced Khovanov homology of a link and the Heegaard Floer homology of its branched double cover. As an application, we give combinatorial proofs of tightness for several contact structures which are not Stein-fillable. Lastly, we investigate a comultiplication structure on the reduced Khovanov homology o…
Cylindrical contact homology is a comparatively simple incarnation of symplectic field theory whose existence and invariance under suitable hypotheses was recently established by Hutchings and Nelson. We study this invariant for a general Brieskorn 3-manifold $Σ(a_1,\ldots, a_n)$, and give a complete description of the cylindrical contact homology for this 3-manifold equipped with its natural contact structure, for any $a_j$ satisfying $\frac{1}{a_1} + \cdots + \frac{1}{a_n} < n-2$.
A rigorous foundation for the contact homology of Legendrian submanifolds in a contact manifold of the form $P\times \R$ where $P$ is an exact symplectic manifold is established. The class of such contact manifolds include 1-jet spaces of smooth manifolds. As an application, contact homology is used to provide (smooth) isotopy invariants of submanifolds of $\R^n$ and, more generally, invariants of self transverse immersions into $\R^n$ up to restricted regular homotopies. When $n=3$, this application is the first step in extending and providing a contact geometric underpinning for the new knot…
In this paper we show that any good toric contact manifold has well defined cylindrical contact homology and describe how it can be combinatorially computed from the associated moment cone. As an application we compute the cylindrical contact homology of a particularly nice family of examples that appear in the work of Gauntlett-Martelli-Sparks-Waldram on Sasaki-Einstein metrics. We show in particular that these give rise to a new infinite family of non-equivalent contact structures on $S^2 \times S^{3}$ in the unique homotopy class of almost contact structures with vanishing first Chern class…
We show that if a Legendrian knot in standard contact ${\bb R}^3$ possesses a generating family then there exists an augmentation of the Chekanov-Eliashberg DGA so that the associated linearized contact homology (LCH) is isomorphic to singular homology groups arising from the generating family. In this setting we show Sabloff's duality result for LCH may be viewed as Alexander duality. In addition, we provide an explicit construction of a generating family for a front diagram with graded normal ruling and give a new approach to augmentation $\Rightarrow$ normal ruling.
We study naturality properties of the transverse invariant in knot Floer homology under contact (+1)-surgery. This can be used as a calculational tool for the transverse invariant. As a consequence, we show that the Eliashberg-Chekanov twist knots E_n are not transversely simple for n odd and n>3.
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 define a relative version of contact homology for contact manifolds with convex boundary, and prove basic properties of this relative contact homology. Similar considerations also hold for embedded contact homology.
We list the properties of contact homology, beyond purely formal, needed for the proofs of some of the recent applications of contact homology in dynamics to work. The list is put together for the AIM Transversality in Contact Homology Workshop.
We calculate the relative versions of embedded contact homology, contact homology and cylindrical contact homology of the sutured solid torus $(S^1\times D^2,Γ)$, where $Γ$ consists of $2n$ parallel longitudinal sutures.
In a previous paper, we showed that the original definition of cylindrical contact homology, with rational coefficients, is valid on a closed three-manifold with a dynamically convex contact form. However we did not show that this cylindrical contact homology is an invariant of the contact structure. In the present paper, we define "nonequivariant contact homology" and "S^1-equivariant contact homology", both with integer coefficients, for a contact form on a closed manifold in any dimension with no contractible Reeb orbits. We prove that these contact homologies depend only on the contact str…
In 1995 the author, Jones, and Segal introduced the notion of "Floer homotopy theory". The proposal was to attach a (stable) homotopy type to the geometric data given in a version of Floer homology. More to the point, the question was asked, "When is the Floer homology isomorphic to the (singular) homology of a naturally occuring (pro)spectrum defined from the properties of the moduli spaces inherent in the Floer theory?". A proposal for how to construct such a spectrum was given in terms of a "framed flow category", and some rather simple examples were described. Years passed before this noti…
In this paper we give a rigorous definition of cylindrical contact homology for contact $3$-manifolds that admit nondegenerate contact forms with no contractible Reeb orbits, and show that the cylindrical contact homology is an invariant of the contact structure.
Embedded contact homology (ECH) is a kind of Floer homology for contact three-manifolds. Taubes has shown that ECH is isomorphic to a version of Seiberg-Witten Floer homology (and both are conjecturally isomorphic to a version of Heegaard Floer homology). This isomorphism allows information to be transferred between topology and contact geometry in three dimensions. In this article we first give an overview of the definition of embedded contact homology. We then outline its applications to generalizations of the Weinstein conjecture, the Arnold chord conjecture, and obstructions to symplectic …
Computing embedded contact homology (ECH) and related invariants of certain toric 3-manifolds (in the sense of Lerman) has led to interesting new results in the study of symplectic embeddings. Here, we give a combinatorial formulation of ECH chain complexes for general toric contact 3-manifolds. As a corollary, we prove Conjecture A.3 from [Hutchings14].
We show that for dynamically convex contact forms in three dimensions, the cylindrical contact homology differential d can be defined by directly counting holomorphic cylinders for a generic almost complex structure, without any abstract perturbation of the Cauchy-Riemann equation. We also prove that d^2 = 0. Invariance of cylindrical contact homology in this case can be proved using S^1-dependent almost complex structures, similarly to work of Bourgeois-Oancea; this will be explained in another paper.
The Floer homology of a cotangent bundle is isomorphic to loop space homology of the underlying manifold, as proved by Abbondandolo-Schwarz, Salamon-Weber, and Viterbo. In this paper we show that in the presence of a Dirac magnetic monopole which admits a primitive with sublinear growth on the universal cover, the Floer homology in atoroidal free homotopy classes is again isomorphic to loop space homology. As a consequence we prove that for any atoroidal free homotopy class and any sufficiently small T>0, any magnetic flow associated to the Dirac magnetic monopole has a closed orbit of period …
We give an algorithm for computing the contact homology of some Brieskorn manifolds. As an application, we construct infinitely many contact structures on the class of simply connected contact manifolds that admit nice contact forms (i.e. no Reeb orbits of degree -1,0 or 1) and have index positivity with trivial first Chern class.
In this paper we prove a recursion relation between the the one-point genus-0 gravitational descendants of a Stein domain $(M,\partial M)$. This relation is best described by the degree -2 map $D$ in the linearized contact homology of $\partial M$, arising from the Bourgeois--Oancea exact sequence between symplectic homology of $M$ and linearized contact homology of $\partial M$. All one-point genus-0 gravitational descendants can be reduce to the one-point Gromov--Witten invariants via iterates of $D$.
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 give a construction of contact homology in the sense of Eliashberg--Givental--Hofer. Specifically, we construct coherent virtual fundamental cycles on the relevant compactified moduli spaces of pseudo-holomorphic curves.
This paper is the sequel to the previous paper [Ne15], which showed that sufficient regularity exists to define cylindrical contact homology in dimension three for nondegenerate dynamically separated contact forms, a subclass of dynamically convex contact forms. The Reeb orbits of these so-called dynamically separated contact forms satisfy a uniform growth condition on their Conley-Zehnder indices with respect to a free homotopy class; see Definition 1.7. {Given a contact form which is dynamically separated up to large action, we demonstrate a filtration by action on the chain complex and show…
The purpose of this paper is to give a survey of the various versions of Floer homology for manifolds with contact type boundary that have so far appeared in the literature. Under the name of ``Symplectic homology'' or ``Floer homology for manifolds with boundary'' they bear in fact common features and we shall try to underline the principles that unite them. Once this will be accomplished we shall proceed to describe the peculiarity of each of the constructions and the specific applications that unfold out of it: classification of ellipsoids and polydiscs in $\CC^n$, stability of the action s…
We calculate the sutured version of cylindrical contact homology of a sutured contact solid torus $(S^1\times D^2,Γ, ξ)$, where $Γ$ consists of $2n$ parallel sutures of arbitrary slope and $ξ$ is a universally tight contact structure. In particular, we show that it is non-zero. This computation is one of the first computations of the sutured version of cylindrical contact homology and does not follow from computations in the closed case.
We summarize recent work on a combinatorial knot invariant called knot contact homology. We also discuss the origins of this invariant in symplectic topology, via holomorphic curves and a conormal bundle naturally associated to the knot.
We give a proof of, for the case of contact structures defined by global contact 1-forms, a Theorem stated by Eliashberg that for any overtwisted contact structure on a closed 3-manifold, its contact homology is 0. A different proof is also outlined in the appendix by Yakov Eliashberg.
The goal of this paper is to set up the general framework of higher-dimensional Heegaard Floer homology, define the contact class, and use it to give an obstruction to the Liouville fillability of a contact manifold and a sufficient condition for the Weinstein conjecture to hold. We discuss several classes of examples including those coming from analyzing a close cousin of symplectic Khovanov homology and the analog of the Plamenevskaya invariant of transverse links.
It is a conjecture of Colin and Honda that the number of Reeb periodic orbits of universally tight contact structures on hyperbolic manifolds grows exponentially with the period, and they speculate further that the growth rate of contact homology is polynomial on non-hyperbolic geometries. Along the line of the conjecture, for manifolds with a hyperbolic component that fibers on the circle, we prove that there are infinitely many non-isomorphic contact structures for which the number of Reeb periodic orbits of any non-degenerate Reeb vector field grows exponentially. Our result hinges on the e…
Knot contact homology studies symplectic and contact geometric properties of conormals of knots in 3-manifolds using holomorphic curve techniques. It has connections to both mathematical and physical theories. On the mathematical side, we review the theory, show that it gives a complete knot invariant, and discuss its connections to Fukaya categories, string topology, and micro-local sheaves. On the physical side, we describe the connection between the augmentation variety of knot contact homology and Gromov-Witten disk potentials, and discuss the corresponding higher genus relation that quant…
We consider a family of tight contact structures on the three-dimensional torus and we compute the relative Contact Homology by using the variational theory of critical points at infinity. We will also show some algebraic equivariant homology reductions.
We show that the differential in positive equivariant symplectic homology or linearized contact homology vanishes for non-degenerate Reeb flows with a continuous invariant Lagrangian subbundle (e.g. Anosov Reeb flows). Several applications are given, including obstructions to the existence of these flows and abundance of periodic orbits for contact forms representing an Anosov contact structure.
We establish a relation between the growth of the cylindrical contact homology of a contact manifold and the topological entropy of Reeb flows on this manifold. We show that if a contact manifold $(M,ξ)$ admits a hypertight contact form $λ_0$ for which the cylindrical contact homology has exponential homotopical growth rate, then the Reeb flow of every contact form on $(M,ξ)$ has positive topological entropy. Using this result, we provide numerous new examples of contact 3-manifolds on which every Reeb flow has positive topological entropy.
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…
Rabinowitz Floer homology has been investigated on a submanifold of contact type. The contact condition, however, is quite restrictive. For example, a product of contact hypersurfaces is rarely of contact type. In this article, we study Rabinowitz Floer homology for a class of non-contact submanifolds. We show for this example that there are infinitely many leafwise intersection points by proving a Künneth formula for Rabinowitz Floer homology.
Let $M$ be an exact symplectic manifold with contact type boundary such that $c_1(M)=0$. In this paper we show that the cyclic cohomology of the Fukaya category of $M$ has the structure of an involutive Lie bialgebra. Inspired by a work of Cieliebak-Latschev we show that there is a Lie bialgebra homomorphism from the linearized contact homology of $M$ to the cyclic cohomology of the Fukaya category. Our study is also motivated by string topology and 2-dimensional topological conformal field theory.