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 def
inition 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.
This article studies the abelian analytic torsion on a closed, oriented, Sasakian three-manifold and identifies this quantity as a specific multiple of the natural unit symplectic volume form on the moduli space of flat abelian connections. This iden
tification computes the analytic torsion explicitly in terms of Seifert data.
Chern-Simons theory on a closed contact three-manifold is studied when the Lie group for gauge transformations is compact, connected and abelian. A rigorous definition of an abelian Chern-Simons partition function is derived using the Faddeev-Popov g
auge fixing method. A symplectic abelian Chern-Simons partition function is also derived using the technique of non-abelian localization. This physically identifies the symplectic abelian partition function with the abelian Chern-Simons partition function as rigorous topological three-manifold invariants. This study leads to a natural identification of the abelian Reidemeister-Ray-Singer torsion as a specific multiple of the natural unit symplectic volume form on the moduli space of flat abelian connections for the class of Sasakian three-manifolds. The torsion part of the abelian Chern-Simons partition function is computed explicitly in terms of Seifert data for a given Sasakian three-manifold.
This paper studies U(1)-Chern-Simons theory and its relation to a construction of Chris Beasley and Edward Witten. The natural geometric setup here is that of a three-manifold with a Seifert structure. Based on a suggestion of Edward Witten we are le
d to study the stationary phase approximation of the path integral for U(1)-Chern-Simons theory after one of the three components of the gauge field is decoupled. This gives an alternative formulation of the partition function for U(1)-Chern-Simons theory that is conjecturally equivalent to the usual U(1)-Chern-Simons theory. The goal of this paper is to establish this conjectural equivalence rigorously through appropriate regularization techniques. This approach leads to some rather surprising results and opens the door to studying hypoelliptic operators and their associated eta invariants in a new light.
We compute the gravitational Chern-Simons term explicitly for an adiabatic family of metrics using standard methods in general relativity. We use the fact that our base three-manifold is a quasi-regular K-contact manifold heavily in this computation.
Our key observation is that this geometric assumption corresponds exactly to a Kaluza-Klein Ansatz for the metric tensor on our three manifold, which allows us to translate our problem into the language of general relativity. Similar computations have been performed in a paper of Guralnik, Iorio, Jackiw and Pi (2003), although not in the adiabatic context.
This article studies the nonabelian localization results of Beasley and Witten, and considers the analogue of these results when the gauge group is U(1). It compares these results with results of Manoliu on abelian Chern-Simons theory, showing that t
he dependence on the coupling constant is the same.
