Let @math be a contact form on a manifold @math , and @math a closed Legendrian submanifold. I prove that @math intersects some characteristic for @math at least twice if all characteristics are closed and of the same period, and @math embeds nicely into the product of @math and an exact symplectic manifold. As an application of the method of proof, the minimal action of a regular closed coisotropic submanifold of complex projective space is at most @math . This yields an obstruction to presymplectic embeddings, and in particular to Lagrangian embeddings.
In @cite_14 K. Cieliebak proved that Legendrian spheres in the boundaries of certain subcritical Weinstein domains intersect some characteristic for @math at least twice.
@cite_14
2027438934 2096712060 2603883167 2041867826
Arnold conjectured that every Legendrian knot in the standard contact structure on the 3-sphere possesses a characteristic chord with respect to any contact form. I confirm this conjecture if the know has Thurston-Bennequin invariant −1. More generally, existence of chords is proved for a standard Legendrian unknot on the boundary of a subcritical Stein manifold of any dimension. There is also a multiplicity result which implies in some situations existence of infinitely many chords.¶The proof relies on the behaviour of symplectic homology under handle attaching. The main observation is that symplectic homology only changes in the presence of chords. We study holomorphic spheres in certain symplectic cobordisms and derive information about periodic Reeb orbits in the concave end of these cobordisms from the non-compactness of the relevant moduli spaces. We use this to confirm the strong Weinstein conjecture (predicting the existence of null-homologous Reeb links) for various higher-dimensional contact manifolds, including contact type hypersurfaces in subcritical Stein manifolds and in some cotangent bundles. The quantitative character of this result leads to the definition of a symplectic capacity. Let (S, fλ) be the three sphere endowed with a contact form fλ, where λ is the standard tight contact form on S and f : S → R 0 is a smooth function. Moreover let L ⊂ S be a Legendrian knot. Then V.I. Arnold raised the conjecture in 1986 that there is a characteristic chord, i.e. an orbit x of the Reeb vectorfield that intersects the knot L at two different times. Characteristic chords are important in the theory of contact homology, see [6], [5]. Very little is known about their existence or non-existence . Using a deep result by H. Hofer, K. Wysocki and E. Zehnder about the existence of a global surface of section in strictly convex hypersurfaces in R, we observe that characteristic chords exist for certain Legendrian knots in strictly convex hypersurfaces in R. We consider the relationship of the geometry of compact Riemannian manifolds with boundary to the first nonzero eigenvalue σ1 of the Dirichlet-to-Neumann map (Steklov eigenvalue). For surfaces Σ with genus γ and k boundary components we obtain the upper bound σ1L(∂Σ)⩽2(γ+k)π. For γ=0 and k=1 this result was obtained by Weinstock in 1954, and is sharp. We attempt to find the best constant in this inequality for annular surfaces (γ=0 and k=2). For rotationally symmetric metrics we show that the best constant is achieved by the induced metric on the portion of the catenoid centered at the origin which meets a sphere orthogonally and hence is a solution of the free boundary problem for the area functional in the ball. For a general class of (not necessarily rotationally symmetric) metrics on the annulus, which we call supercritical, we prove that σ1(Σ)L(∂Σ) is dominated by that of the critical catenoid with equality if and only if the annulus is conformally equivalent to the critical catenoid by a conformal transformation which is an isometry on the boundary. Motivated by the annulus case, we show that a proper submanifold of the ball is immersed by Steklov eigenfunctions if and only if it is a free boundary solution. We then prove general upper bounds for conformal metrics on manifolds of any dimension which can be properly conformally immersed into the unit ball in terms of certain conformal volume quantities. We show that these bounds are only achieved when the manifold is minimally immersed by first Steklov eigenfunctions. We also use these ideas to show that any free boundary solution in two dimensions has area at least π, and we observe that this implies the sharp isoperimetric inequality for free boundary solutions in the two-dimensional case.