Conormal bundles, contact homology and knot invariants

We construct a new invariant of transverse links in the standard contact structure on R^3. This invariant is a doubly filtered version of the knot contact homology differential graded algebra (DGA) of the link. Here the knot contact homology of a link in R^3 is the Legendrian contact homology DGA of its conormal lift into the unit cotangent bundle S^*R^3 of R^3, and the filtrations are constructed by counting intersections of the holomorphic disks of the DGA differential with...

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 ...

We introduce a variant of contact homology for convex open contact manifolds. As an application, we prove the existence of (in fact, infinitely many) exotic tight contact structures on $\mathbb{R}^{2n-1}$ for all $n>2$.

We define an invariant of contact 3-manifolds with convex boundary using Kronheimer and Mrowka's sutured monopole Floer homology theory (SHM). Our invariant can be viewed as a generalization of Kronheimer and Mrowka's contact invariant for closed contact 3-manifolds and as the monopole Floer analogue of Honda, Kazez, and Mati\'c's contact invariant in sutured Heegaard Floer homology (SFH). In the process of defining our invariant, we construct maps on SHM associated to contac...

This article sketches various ideas in contact geometry that have become useful in low-dimensional topology. Specifically we (1) outline the proof of Eliashberg and Thurston's results concerning perturbations of foliatoins into contact structures, (2) discuss Eliashberg and Weinstein's symplectic handle attachments, and (3) briefly discuss Giroux's insights into open book decompositions and contact geometry. Bringing these pieces together we discuss the construction of ``symp...

This is a set of expository lecture notes created originally for a graduate course on holomorphic curves taught at ETH Zurich and the Humboldt University Berlin in 2009/2010. The notes are still incomplete, but due to recent requests from readers, I've decided to make a presentable half-finished version available here. Further chapters will be added in future updates.

These notes are an expanded version of an introductory lecture on contact geometry given at the 2001 Georgia Topology Conference. They are intended to present some of the "topological" aspects of three dimensional contact geometry.

In the paper we prove, that extrinsic curvature does not impose restrictions on the topology of a contact structure, except the obvious ones.

This is the preliminary manuscript of a book on symplectic field theory based on a lecture course for PhD students given in 2015-16. It covers the essentials of the analytical theory of punctured pseudoholomorphic curves, taking the opportunity to fill in gaps in the existing literature where necessary, and then gives detailed explanations of a few of the standard applications in contact topology such as distinguishing contact structures up to contactomorphism and proving sym...

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.