We introduce and study the notion of contact dual pair adopting a line bundle approach to contact and Jacobi geometry. A contact dual pair is a pair of Jacobi morphisms defined on the same contact manifold and satisfying a certain orthogonality condition. Contact groupoids and contact reduction are the main sources of examples. Among other properties, we prove the Characteristic Leaf Correspondence Theorem for contact dual pairs which parallels the analogous result of Weinstein for symplectic dual pairs.
We consider manifolds endowed with a contact pair structure. To such a structure are naturally associated two almost complex structures. If they are both integrable, we call the structure a normal contact pair. We generalize the Morimotos Theorem on product of almost contact manifolds to flat bundles. We construct some examples on Boothby--Wang fibrations over contact-symplectic manifolds. In particular, these results give new methods to construct complex manifolds.
Adopting the omni-Lie algebroid approach to Dirac-Jacobi structures, we propose and investigate a notion of weak dual pairs in Dirac-Jacobi geometry. Their main motivating examples arise from the theory of multiplicative precontact structures on Lie groupoids. Among other properties of weak dual pairs, we prove two main results. 1) We show that the property of fitting in a weak dual pair defines an equivalence relation for Dirac-Jacobi manifolds. So, in particular, we get the existence of self-dual pairs and this immediately leads to an alternative proof of the normal form theorem around Dirac-Jacobi transversals. 2) We prove the characteristic leaf correspondence theorem for weak dual pairs paralleling and extending analogous results for symplectic and contact dual pairs. Moreover, the same ideas of this proof apply to get a presymplectic leaf correspondence for weak dual pairs in Dirac geometry (not yet present in literature).
We introduce a new geometric structure on differentiable manifolds. A textit{Contact} textit{Pair}on a manifold $M$ is a pair $(alpha,eta) $ of Pfaffian forms of constant classes $2k+1$ and $2h+1$ respectively such that $alphawedge dalpha^{k}wedgeetawedge deta^{h}$ is a volume form. Both forms have a characteristic foliation whose leaves are contact manifolds. These foliations are transverse and complementary. Further differential objects are associated to Contact Pairs: two commuting Reeb vector fields, Legendrian curves on $M$ and two Lie brackets on $mathcal{C}^{infty}(M) $. We give a local model and several existence theorems on nilpotent Lie groups, nilmanifolds, bundles over the circle and principal torus bundles.
Unlike Legendrian submanifolds, the deformation problem of coisotropic submanifolds can be obstructed. Starting from this observation, we single out in the contact setting the special class of integral coisotropic submanifolds as the direct generalization of Legendrian submanifolds for what concerns deformation and moduli theory. Indeed, being integral coisotropic is proved to be a rigid condition, and moreover the integral coisotropic deformation problem is unobstructed with discrete moduli space.
We show that $phi$-invariant submanifolds of metric contact pairs with orthogonal characteristic foliations make constant angles with the Reeb vector fields. Our main result is that for the normal case such submanifolds of dimension at least $2$ are all minimal. We prove that an odd-dimensional $phi$-invariant submanifold of a metric contact pair with orthogonal characteristic foliations inherits a contact form with an almost contact metric structure, and this induced structure is contact metric if and only if the submanifold is tangent to one Reeb vector field and orthogonal to the other one. Furthermore we show that the leaves of the two characteristic foliations of the differentials of the contact pair are minimal. We also prove that when one Reeb vector field is Killing and spans one characteristic foliation, the metric contact pair is a product of a contact metric manifold with $mathbb{R}$.