Conormal bundles, contact homology and knot invariants

Knot contact homology is an ambient isotopy invariant of knots and links in $\mathbb R^3$. The purpose of this paper is to extend this definition to an ambient isotopy invariant of tangles and prove that gluing of tangles gives a gluing formula for knot contact homology. As a consequence of the gluing formula we obtain that the tangle contact homology weakly detects the $1$-dimensional untangle.

We apply the conormal construction to a hyperbolic knot $K \subset S^3$, and study the sutured contact manifold $(V, \xi)$ obtained by taking the complement of a standard neighbourhood of the unit conormal $\La_K \subset (ST^*S^3, \xi_\text{st})$. We show that the sutured Legendrian contact homology of a unit fiber $\La_0$, with its product structure, is a complete invariant of the knot (up to mirror). This can also be seen as the computation of the homology of the fiber in $...

We construct an enhanced version of knot contact homology, and show that we can deduce from it the group ring of the knot group together with the peripheral subgroup. In particular, it completely determines a knot up to smooth isotopy. The enhancement consists of the (fully noncommutative) Legendrian contact homology associated to the union of the conormal torus of the knot and a disjoint cotangent fiber sphere, along with a product on a filtered part of this homology. As a c...

These notes give an introduction to embedded contact homology (ECH) of contact three-manifolds, gathering together many basic notions which are scattered across a number of papers. We also discuss the origins of ECH, including various remarks and examples which have not been previously published. Finally, we review the recent application to four-dimensional symplectic embedding problems. This article is based on lectures given in Budapest and Munich in the summer of 2012, a s...

Let E be a circle bundle over a Riemann surface that supports a contact structure transverse to the fibers. This paper presents a combinatorial definition of a differential graded algebra (DGA) that is an invariant of Legendrian knots in E. The invariant generalizes Chekanov's combinatorial DGA invariant of Legendrian knots in the standard contact 3-space using ideas from Eliashberg, Givental, and Hofer's contact homology. The main difficulty lies in dealing with what are ost...

For a smooth compact submanifold $K$ of a Riemannian manifold $Q$, its unit conormal bundle $\Lambda_K$ is a Legendrian submanifold of the unit cotangent bundle of $Q$ with a canonical contact structure. Using pseudo-holomorphic curve techniques, the Legendrian contact homology of $\Lambda_K$ is defined when, for instance, $Q=\mathbb{R}^n$. In this paper, aiming at giving another description of this homology, we define a graded $\mathbb{R}$-algebra for any pair $(Q,K)$ with o...

Given two closed contact three-manifolds, one can form their contact connected sum via the Weinstein one-handle attachment. We study how pseudo-holomorphic curves in the symplectization behave under this operation. As a result, we give a connected sum formula for embedded contact homology.

These notes were prepared to supplement the talk that I gave on Feb 19, 2004, at the First East Asian School of Knots and Related Topics, Seoul, South Korea. In this article I review aspects of the interconnections between braids, knots and contact structures on Euclidean 3-space. I discuss my recent work with William Menasco (arXiv math.GT/0310279)} and (arXiv math.GT/0310280). In the latter we prove that there are distinct transversal knot types in contact 3-space having th...

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. Whe...

In this paper, we compute contact homology of some quasi-regular contact structures, which admit Hamiltonian actions of Reeb type of Lie groups. We will discuss the toric contact case, (where the torus is of Reeb type), and the case of homogeneous contact manifolds. In both of these cases the quotients by the Reeb action are K\"ahler and admit perfect Morse-Bott functions via the moment map. It turns out that the contact homology depends only on the homology of the symplectic...