We prove that for regular contact forms there exists a bijective correspondence between the $C^0$ limits of sequences of smooth strictly contact isotopies and the limits with respect to the contact distance of their corresponding Hamiltonians.
We prove that any small enough neighborhood of a closed contact submanifold is always tight under a mild assumption on its normal bundle. The non-existence of $C^0$--small positive loops of contactomorphisms in general overtwisted manifolds is shown as a corollary.
We consider a large family F of torus bundles over the circle, and we use recent work of Li--Mak to construct, on each Y in F, a Stein fillable contact structure C. We prove that (i) each Stein filling of (Y,C) has vanishing first Chern class and fir
st Betti number, (ii) if Y in F is elliptic then all Stein fillings of (Y,C) are pairwise diffeomorphic and (iii) if Y in F is parabolic or hyperbolic then all Stein fillings of (Y,C) share the same Betti numbers and fall into finitely many diffeomorphism classes. Moreover, for infinitely many hyperbolic torus bundles Y in F we exhibit non-homotopy equivalent Stein fillings of (Y,C).
We study homotopically non-trivial spheres of Legendrians in the standard contact R3 and S3. We prove that there is a homotopy injection of the contactomorphism group of S3 into some connected components of the space of Legendrians induced by the nat
ural action. We also provide examples of loops of Legendrians that are non-trivial in the space of formal Legendrians, and thus non-trivial as loops of Legendrians, but which are trivial as loops of smooth embeddings for all the smooth knot types.
Sivek proves a van Kampen decomposition theorem for the combinatorial Legendrian contact algebra (also known as the Chekanov-Eliashberg algebra) of knots in standard contact $R^3$ . We prove an analogous result for the holomorphic curve version of th
e Legendrian contact algebra of certain Legendrians submanifolds in standard contact $J^1(M).$ This includes all 1- and 2-dimensional Legendrians, and some higher dimensional ones. We present various applications including a Mayer-Vietoris sequence for linearized contact homology similar to Siveks and a connect sum formula for the augmentation variety introduced by Ng. The main tool is the theory of gradient flow trees developed by Ekholm.