English

Combinatorial Reeb dynamics on punctured contact 3-manifolds

Symplectic Geometry 2023-06-14 v5 Geometric Topology

Abstract

Let Λ±=Λ+Λ(R3,ξstd)\Lambda^{\pm} = \Lambda^{+} \cup \Lambda^{-} \subset (\mathbb{R}^{3}, \xi_{std}) be a contact surgery diagram determining a closed, connected contact 33-manifold (SΛ±3,ξΛ±)(S^{3}_{\Lambda^{\pm}}, \xi_{\Lambda^{\pm}}) and an open contact manifold (RΛ±3,ξΛ±)(\mathbb{R}^{3}_{\Lambda^{\pm}}, \xi_{\Lambda^{\pm}}). Following arXiv:0911.0026 and arXiv:1906.07228 we demonstrate how Λ±\Lambda^{\pm} determines a family αϵ\alpha_{\epsilon} of contact forms on (RΛ±3,ξΛ±)(\mathbb{R}^{3}_{\Lambda^{\pm}}, \xi_{\Lambda^{\pm}}) whose closed Reeb orbits are in one-to-one correspondence with cyclic words of composable Reeb chords on Λ±\Lambda^{\pm}. We compute the homology classes and integral Conley-Zehnder indices of these orbits diagrammatically and develop algebraic tools for studying holomorphic curves in surgery cobordisms between the (RΛ±3,ξΛ±)(\mathbb{R}^{3}_{\Lambda^{\pm}}, \xi_{\Lambda^{\pm}}). These new techniques are used to describe the first known examples of closed, tight contact manifolds with vanishing contact homology. They are contact 1k\frac{1}{k} surgeries along the right-handed, tb=1tb=1 trefoil for k>0k > 0, which are known to have non-zero Heegaard-Floer contact classes by arXiv:math/0404135.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2005.11428,
  title  = {Combinatorial Reeb dynamics on punctured contact 3-manifolds},
  author = {Russell Avdek},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2005.11428},
  year   = {2023}
}

Comments

91 pages, 32 figures. V5: Minor updates

R2 v1 2026-06-23T15:45:09.804Z