Orderability of contact manifolds is related in some non-obvious ways to the topology of a contact manifold Σ. We know, for instance, that if Σ admits a 2-subcritical Stein filling, it must be non-orderable. By way of contrast, in this talk I will discuss ways of modifying Liouville structures for high-dimensional Σ so that the result is always orderable. The main technical tool is a Morse-Bott Floer-theoretic growth rate, which has some parallels with Givental’s non-linear Maslov index. I will also discuss a generalization to the relative case, and applications to bi-invariant metrics on Cont(Σ).
This video is part of the Institute for Advanced Study‘s Symplectic geometry seminar.
