The Thurston-Bennequin invariant provides one notion of self-linking for any homologically-trivial Legendrian curve in a contact three-manifold. Here we discuss related analytic notions of self-linking for Legendrian knots in Euclidean space. Our definition is based upon a reformulation of the elementary Gauss linking integral and is motivated by ideas from supersymmetric gauge theory. We recover the Thurston-Bennequin invariant as a special case.
In this article we study Weinstein structures endowed with a Lefschetz fibration in terms of the Legendrian front projection. First we provide a systematic recipe for translating from a Weinstein Lefschetz bifibration to a Legendrian handlebody. Then we present several applications of this technique to symplectic topology. This includes the detection of flexibility and rigidity for several families of Weinstein manifolds and the existence of closed exact Lagrangian submanifolds. In addition, we prove that the Koras--Russell cubic is Stein deformation equivalent to affine complex 3-space and verify the affine parts of the algebraic mirrors of two Weinstein 4-manifolds.
We give a geometric interpretation of the coefficients of the HOMFLYPT polynomial of any link in the three-sphere as counts of holomorphic curves. The curves counted live in the resolved conifold where they have boundary on a shifted copy of the link conormal, as predicted by Ooguri and Vafa.. To prove this, we introduce a new method to define invariant counts of holomorphic curves with Lagrangian boundary: we show geometrically that the wall crossing associated to boundary bubbling is the framed skein relation. It then follows that counting holomorphic curves by the class of their boundary in the skein of the Lagrangian brane gives a deformation invariant curve count. This is a mathematically rigorous incarnation of the fact that boundaries of open topological strings create line defects in Chern-Simons theory, as described by Witten. The technical key to skein invariance is a new compactness result: if the Gromov limit of J-holomorphic immersions collapses a curve component, then its image has a singularity worse than a node.
In this article, we prove a Legendrian Whitney trick which allows for the removal of intersections between codimension-two contact submanifolds and Legendrian submanifolds, assuming such a smooth cancellation is possible. This technique is applied to show the existence h-principle for codimension-two contact embeddings with a prescribed contact structure.
We determine the skein-valued Gromov-Witten partition function for a single toric Lagrangian brane in $mathbb{C}^3$ or the resolved conifold. We first show geometrically they must satisfy a certain skein-theoretic recursion, and then solve this equation. The recursion is a skein-valued quantization of the equation of the mirror curve. The solution is the expected hook-content formula.
Let $X$ be a Weinstein manifold with ideal contact boundary $Y$. If $Lambdasubset Y$ is a link of Legendrian spheres in $Y$ then by attaching Weinstein handles to $X$ along $Lambda$ we get a Weinstein cobordism $X_{Lambda}$ with a collection of Lagrangian co-core disks $C$ corresponding to $Lambda$. In cite{BEE, EL} it was shown that the wrapped Floer cohomology $CW^{ast}(C)$ of $C$ in the Weinstein manifold $X_{Lambda}=Xcup X_{Lambda}$is naturally isomorphic to the Legendrian differential graded algebra $CE^{ast}(Lambda)$ of $Lambda$ in $Y$. The argument uses properties of moduli spaces of holomorphic curves, the proofs of which were only sketched. The purpose of this paper is to provide proofs of these properties.