Tag - Contact geometry

Lenhard Ng: New Algebraic Invariants of Legendrian Links

24th May, 2024

For the past 25 years, Legendrian contact homology has played a key role in contact topology. I'll discuss a package of new invariants for Legendrian knots and links that builds on Legendrian contact homology and is derived from rational symplectic field theory. This includes a Poisson bracket on Legendrian contact homology and a symplectic structure on augmentation varieties. Time permitting, I'll also describe an unexpected connection to cluster theory for a family of Legendrian links associated to positive braids.

Thomas Mark: Constraints on Contact Type Hypersurfaces in Symplectic 4-Manifolds

4th March, 2024

In joint work with Bulent Tosun, it was shown that Heegaard Floer theory provides an obstruction for a contact 3-manifold to embed as a contact type hypersurface in standard symplectic 4-space. As one consequence, no Brieskorn homology sphere admits such an embedding (regardless of the contact structure). I will review the ideas that lead to these results, and discuss recent extensions that can obstruct suitably convex embeddings in closed symplectic 4-manifolds, particularly rational complex surfaces.

Thomas Massoni: Taut Foliations Through a Contact Lens

26th January, 2024

In the late 90s, Eliashberg and Thurston established a remarkable connection between foliations and contact structures in dimension three: any co-oriented, aspherical foliation on a closed, oriented 3-manifold can be approximated by positive and negative contact structures. Additionally, when the foliation is taut, its contact approximations are (universally) tight. In this talk, I will present a converse result concerning the construction of taut foliations from suitable pairs of contact structures. I will also describe a comprehensive dictionary between the languages of foliations and of (pairs of) contact structures. Although taut foliations are usually considered rigid objects, this contact viewpoint reveals some degree of flexibility. As an application, I will show that taut foliations survive after performing large slope surgeries along transverse knots.

Soham Chanda: Augmentation Varieties and Disk Potential

26th January, 2024

Dimitroglou-Rizell-Golovko constructs a family of Legendrians in prequantization bundles by taking lifts of monotone Lagrangians. These lifted Legendrians have a Morse-Bott family of Reeb chords. We construct a version of Legendrian Contact Homology (LCH) for Rizell-Golovko's lifted Legendrians by counting treed disks. Our formalism of LCH allows us to obtain augmentations from certain non-exact fillings. We prove a conjecture of Rizell-Golovko relating the augmentation variety assoiciated to the LCH of a lifted Legendrian and the disk potential of the base Lagrangian. As an application, we show that lifts of monotone Lagrangian tori in projective spaces with different disk-potentials, e.g. as constructed by Vianna, produce non-isotopic Legendrian tori in contact spheres.

Matthias Meiwes: C0 Stability of Topological Entropy for 3-Dimensional Reeb Flows

24th November, 2023

The C0 distance on the space of contact forms on a contact manifold has been studied recently by different authors. It can be thought of as an analogue for Reeb flows of the Hofer metric on the space of Hamiltonian diffeomorphisms. In this talk, I will explain some recent progress on the stability properties of the topological entropy with respect to this distance obtained in collaboration with M. Alves, L. Dahinden, and A. Pirnapasov. Our main result states that the topological entropy for closed contact 3-manifolds is lower semi-continuous in the C0 distance for C∞-generic contact froms. Applying our methods to geodesic flows of surfaces, we obtain that the points of lower-semicontinuity of the topological entropy include non-degenerate metrics. In particular, given a geodesic flow of such a metric with positive topological entropy, the topological entropy does not vanish for sufficiently C0-small perturbations of the metric.

Alberto Abbondandolo: Symplectic Capacities of Domains Close to a Ball and Geodesics in the Space of Contact Forms

13th November, 2023

An old open question in symplectic geometry asks whether all normalized symplectic capacities coincide for convex domains in the standard symplectic vector space. I will show that this question has a positive answer for smooth convex domains which are C2-close to a Euclidean ball. This is related to the question of existence of minimizing geodesics in the space of contact forms on a closed contact manifold equipped with a Banach-Mazur-like metric. On the other hand, there are smooth domains which are arbitrarily C1-close to the ball for which the ball capacity is strictly smaller than the cylindrical capacity.

Oliver Edtmair: The Subleading Asymptotics of Symplectic Weyl Laws

3rd November, 2023

Spectral invariants defined via Embedded Contact Homology (ECH) or the closely related Periodic Floer Homology (PFH) satisfy a Weyl law: Asymptotically, they recover symplectic volume. This Weyl law has led to striking applications in dynamics (smooth closing lemma) and symplectic geometry (simplicity conjecture). In this talk, I will report on work in progress concerning the subleading asymptotics of symplectic Weyl laws. I will explain the connection to symplectic packing problems and the algebraic structure of groups of Hamiltonian diffeomorphisms and homeomorphisms.

Gabriele Benedetti: Rigidity and Flexibility of Periodic Hamiltonian Flows

30th October, 2023

An old problem in classical mechanics is the existence of periodic flows within specific classes of Hamiltonian systems such as geodesic and magnetic flows, and central forces. In the last years, interest in this problem has been revitalized since recent research has unveiled a deep relationship between periodic Hamiltonian flows and systolic questions in symplectic and contact geometry. While only trivial examples of periodic flows among magnetic and central systems exist, Zoll and, later, Guillemin have shown that there are many exotic examples among geodesic flows on the two-sphere. Following Guillemin's approach, the goal of this talk is to show how the Nash-Moser implicit function theorem can be used to construct magnetic flows on the two-torus which are periodic for a single value of the energy.

Lukas Nakamura: A Metric on the Contactomorphism Group of an Orderable Contact Manifold

27th October, 2023

We discuss some properties of a pseudo-metric on the contactomorphism group of a strict contact manifold M induced by the maximum/minimum of Hamiltonians. We show that it is non-degenerate if and only if M is orderable and that its metric topology agrees with the interval topology introduced by Chernov and Nemirovski. We also discuss analogous results on isotopy classes of Legendrian submanifolds and on universal covers.

Bulent Tosun: Contact Surgeries and Symplectic Fillability

9th October, 2023

It is well known that all contact 3-manifolds can be obtained from the standard contact structure on the 3-sphere by contact surgery on a Legendrian link. Hence, an interesting and much studied question asks what properties are preserved under various types of contact surgeries. The case for the negative contact surgeries is fairly well understood. In this talk, extending an earlier work of the speaker with Conway and Etnyre, we will discuss some new results about symplectic fillability of positive contact surgeries, and in particular we will provide a necessary and sufficient condition for contact (n) surgery along a Legendrian knot to yield a weakly fillable contact manifold, for some integer n > 0. When specialized to knots in the three sphere with its standard tight structure, this result can be effectively used to find many examples of fillable surgeries along with various obstructions and surprising topological applications. For example, we prove that a knot admitting lens space surgery must have slice genus equal to its 4-dimensional clasp number.