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This article introduces two new constructions at the higher homotopy level in the space of Legendrian embeddings in $(\mathbb{R}^3, \xi_{\operatorname{std}})$. We first introduce the parametric Legendrian satellite construction, showing that the satellite operation works for parametric families of Legendrian embeddings. This yields new invariants at the higher-order homotopy level. We then introduce the parametric connected-sum construction. This operation takes as inputs two $n$-spheres based at Legendrian embeddings $K_1$ and $K_2$, respectively, and produces a new $n$-sphere based at $K_1\# K_2$. As a main application we construct new infinite families of loops of Legendrian embeddings with non-trivial LCH monodromy invariant., Comment: 27 pages, 18 figures

Given a class of embeddings into a contact or a symplectic manifold, we give a sufficient condition, that we call isocontact or isosymplectic realization, for this class to satisfy a general $h$-principle. The flexibility follows from the $h$-principles for isocontact and isosymplectic embeddings, it provides a framework for classical results, and we give two new applications. Our main result is that embeddings transverse to a contact structure satisfy a full $h$-principle in two cases: if the complement of the embedding is overtwisted, or when the intersection of the image of the formal derivative with the contact structure is strictly contained in a proper symplectic subbundle. We illustrate the general framework on symplectic manifolds by studying the universality of Hamiltonian dynamics on regular level sets via a class of embeddings., Comment: 33 pages. Minor corrections and expository improvements. To appear in Journal of Topology

In this article we study proper symplectic and iso-symplectic embeddings of $4$--manifolds in $6$--manifolds. We show that a closed orientable smooth $4$--manifold admitting a Lefschetz fibration over $\C P^1$ admits a symplectic embedding in the symplectic manifold $(\C P^1 \times \C P^1 \times \C P^1, \omega_{pr}),$ where $\omega_{pr}$ is the product symplectic form on $\C P^1 \times \C P^1 \times \C P^1.$ We also show that there exists a sub-critical Weinstein $6$--manifold in which all finite type Weinstein $4$--manifolds admit iso-symplectic embeddings.

We compute the homotopy type of the space of embeddings of convex disks with Legendrian boundary into a tight contact $3$-manifold, whenever the sum of the absolute value of the rotation number of the boundary with the Thurston-Bennequin invariant is $-1$, proving that it is homotopy equivalent to the space of smooth embeddings. Using the same ideas it is also determined the homotopy type of the space of embeddings of convex spheres into a tight $3$-fold in terms of the space of smooth spheres. As a consequence we determine the homotopy type of the space of long Legendrian unknots, satisfying the previous condition, into a tight $3$-fold and also of the space of long transverse unknots with self-linking number $-1$, proving that these spaces are homotopy equivalent to the space of smooth long unknots. We also determine the homotopy type of the contactomorphism group of every universally tight handlebody, the standard $\NS^1\times\NS^2$ and every Legendrian fibration over a compact orientable surface with non-empty boundary, partially solving a conjecture due to E. Giroux. Finally, we show that the space of embeddings of Legendrian $(n,n)$-torus links with maximal Thurston-Bennequin invariant is homotopy equivalent to $\U(2)\times K(\mathcal{M}_n,1)$, where $\mathcal{M}_n$ is the mapping class group of the $2$-sphere with $n$-holes., Comment: Version 1 of this article contained a wrong statement (Theorem 1.0.4, whose proof depended on Proposition 4.4.1 which is wrong). However, most of the Lemmas and Corollaries were true. This version 2 just collects half of the first paper. The second half of the paper will appear in a forthcoming project

Can every physical system simulate any Turing machine? This is a classical problem which is intimately connected with the undecidability of certain physical phenomena. Concerning fluid flows, Moore asked in [15] if hydrodynamics is capable of performing computations. More recently, Tao launched a programme based on the Turing completeness of the Euler equations to address the blow up problem in the Navier-Stokes equations. In this direction, the undecidability of some physical systems has been studied in recent years, from the quantum gap problem [7] to quantum field theories [11]. To the best of our knowledge, the existence of undecidable particle paths of 3D fluid flows has remained an elusive open problem since Moore's works in the early 1990's. In this article we construct a Turing complete stationary Euler flow on a Riemannian $S^3$ and speculate on its implications concerning Tao's approach to the blow up problem in the Navier-Stokes equations., Comment: minor changes, 16 pages, 2 figures

The dynamics of an inviscid and incompressible fluid flow on a Riemannian manifold is governed by the Euler equations. Recently, Tao launched a programme to address the global existence problem for the Euler and Navier Stokes equations based on the concept of universality. Inspired by this proposal, in this article we prove that the stationary Euler equations exhibit several universality features. More precisely, we show that any non-autonomous flow on a compact manifold can be extended to a smooth stationary solution of the Euler equations on some Riemannian manifold of possibly higher dimension. The solutions we construct are of Beltrami type, and being stationary they exist for all time. Using this result, we establish the Turing completeness of the steady Euler flows,i.e., there exist solutions that encode a universal Turing machine and, in particular, these solutions have undecidable trajectories. Our proofs deepen the correspondence between contact topology and hydrodynamics, which is key to establish the universality of the Reeb flows and their Beltrami counterparts. An essential ingredient in the proofs, of interest in itself, is a novel flexibility theorem for embeddings in Reeb dynamics in terms of an h-principle in contact geometry, which unveils the flexible behavior of the steady Euler flows. These results can be viewed as lending support to the intuition that solutions to the Euler equations can be extremely complicated in nature., Comment: 27 pages, 3 figures, minor changes, accepted for publication at Advances in Mathematics

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., Comment: 16 Pages, 5 Figures

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 natural 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., Comment: 10 pages, 1 figure

We classify symplectically foliated fillings of certain contact foliated manifolds. We show that up to symplectic deformation, the unique minimal symplectically foliated filling of the foliated sphere cotangent bundle of the Reeb foliation in the 3-sphere is the associated disk cotangent bundle. En route to the proof, we study another foliated manifold, namely the product of a circle and an annulus with almost horizontal foliation. In this case, the foliated unit cotangent bundle does not have a unique minimal symplectic filling. We classify the foliated fillings of this manifold up to symplectic deformation equivalence using combinatorial invariants of the filling., Comment: 37 pages, 3 figures

We relate open book decompositions of a 4-manifold M with its Engel structures. Our main result is, given an open book decomposition of M whose binding is a collection of 2-tori and whose monodromy preserves a framing of a page, the construction of an En-gel structure whose isotropic foliation is transverse to the interior of the pages and tangent to the binding. In particular the pages are contact man-ifolds and the monodromy is a contactomorphism. As a consequence, on a parallelizable closed 4-manifold, every open book with toric binding carries in the previous sense an Engel structure. Moreover, we show that amongst the supported Engel structures we construct, there is a class of loose Engel structures.

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., Comment: 9 pages, 1 figure

This article introduces the notion of a loose family of Engel structures and shows that two such families are Engel homotopic if and only if they are formally homotopic. This implies a complete h-principle when some auxiliary data is fixed. As a corollary, we show that Lorentz and orientable Cartan prolongations are classified up to homotopy by their formal data., Comment: 17 pages, 3 figures, comments welcome. Current version corresponds to published version

We compute the fundamental group of each connected component of the space of formal Legendrian embeddings in R3. We use it to show that previous examples in the literature of non trivial loops of Legendrian embeddings are already non trivial at the formal level. Likewise, we compute the fundamental group of the different connected components of the space of formal horizontal embeddings into the standard Engel R4. We check that this computes the fundamental group of the space of horizontal embeddings as well., Comment: 73 pages, 78 figures. Many changes. The statements and the proofs are pretty much the same, but we have improven the readability, reorganized the paper, streamlined some of the arguments, avoided proofs by picture, corrected some computational mistakes and increased a lot the number of pictures

Kostant gave a model for the real geometric quantization associated to polarizations via the cohomology associated to the sheaf of flat sections of a pre-quantum line bundle. This model is well-adapted for real polarizations given by integrable systems and toric manifolds. In the latter case, the cohomology can be computed counting integral points inside the associated Delzant polytope. In this article we extend Kostant's geometric quantization to semitoric integrable systems and almost toric manifolds. In these cases the dimension of the acting torus is smaller than half of the dimension of the manifold. In particular, we compute the cohomology groups associated to the geometric quantization if the real polarization is the one associated to an integrable system with focus-focus type singularities in dimension four. As application we determine models for the geometric quantization of K3 surfaces, a spin-spin system, the spherical pendulum, and a spin-oscillator system under this scheme., Comment: 20 pages, new section added, minor changes elsewhere, 5 figures

We construct positive loops of Legendrian submanifolds in several instances. In particular, we partially recover G. Liu's result stating that any loose Legendrian admits a positive loop, under some mild topological assumptions on the Legendrian. Moreover, we show contractibility of the constructed loops under an extra topological assumption., Comment: 2 figures

In this article we study immersions of the circle that are tangent to an Engel structure $\mathcal{D}$. We show that a full $h$-principle does exist as soon as one excludes the closed orbits of $\mathcal{W}$, the kernel of $\mathcal{D}$. This is sharp: we elaborate on work of Bryant and Hsu to show that curves tangent to $\mathcal{W}$ often conform additional isolated components that cannot be detected at a formal level. We then show that this is an exceptional phenomenon: if $\mathcal{D}$ is generic, curves tangent to $\mathcal{W}$ are not isolated anymore. We then go on to show that a full $h$-principle holds for immersions transverse to the Engel structure.

We prove the existence of minimal symplectomorphisms and strictly ergodic contactomorphisms on manifolds which admit a locally free $\mathbb{S}^1$--action by symplectomorphisms and contactomorphisms, respectively. The proof adapts the conjugation method, introduced by Anosov and Katok, to the contact and symplectic setting.

We define Maslov--type indices associated to contact and symplectic transformation groups. There are two such families of indices. The first class of indices are maps from the homotopy groups of the contactomorphism or symplectomorphism group to a quotient of the integers. These are based on a generalization of the Maslov index. The second class of indices are maps from the homotopy groups of the space of contact structures or the space of cohomologous symplectic forms to the homotopy groups of a simple homogeneous space. We provide a detailed construction and describe some properties of these indices and their applications.

A foliation is said to admit a foliated contact structure if there is a codimension 1 distribution in the tangent space of the foliation such that the restriction to any leaf is contact. We prove a version of the Weinstein conjecture in the presence of an overtwisted leaf. The result is shown to be sharp., Comment: 17 pages

In this article we prove that the inclusion of the space of Engel structures of a smooth $4$-fold into the space of full flags of its tangent bundle induces surjections in all homotopy groups. In particular, we construct Engel structures representing any given full flag., Comment: 21 pages, 7 figures

We establish geometric criteria to decide whether a contact manifold is overtwisted. Starting with the original definition, we first relate the different overtwisted disks in each dimension and show that a manifold is overtwisted if the Legendrian unknot is loose. Then we characterize overtwistedness in terms of open book decompositions and provide several applications., Comment: 37 Pages. Significantly revised version. In particular, more details added in the Proof of Theorem 3.2. This version to appear in J. Amer. Math. Soc

In this article parametric versions of Wilson's plug and Kuperberg's plug are discussed. We show that there is a weak homotopy equivalence induced by the inclusion between the space of non-singular vector fields tangent to a foliation and the subspace of those without closed orbits, as long as the leaves of the foliation have dimension at least 3. We contrast this with the case of foliations by surfaces in 3-manifolds., Comment: 9 pages, 2 figures

A foliation $(M,\mathcal{F})$ is said to be $2$--calibrated if it admits a closed 2-form $\omega$ making each leaf symplectic. By using approximately holomorphic techniques, a sequence $W_k$ of $2$--calibrated submanifolds of codimension--$2$ can be found for $(M, \mathcal{F}, \omega)$. Our main result says that the Lefschetz hyperplane theorem holds for the pairs $(F, F \cap W_k)$, with $F$ any leaf of $\mathcal{F}$. This is applied to draw important consequences on the transverse geometry of such foliations., Comment: Title and abstract modified. Section 2 on Lie groupoids and essential equivalence greatly reduced. bibliography updated. DOI added (to appear in Nagoya Math. J.)

In this article we address the existence of positive loops of contactomorphisms in overtwisted contact 3-folds. We present a construction of such positive loops in the contact fibered connected sum of certain contact 3-folds along transverse knots. In particular, we obtain positive loops of contactomorphisms in overtwisted contact structures., Comment: 8 pages

In this article we introduce the topological study of codimension-1 foliations which admit contact or symplectic structures on the leaves. A parametric existence h-principle for foliated contact structures is provided for any cooriented foliation in a closed oriented 4-fold., Comment: 18 pages, 3 figures

We prove that on overtwisted contact manifolds there can be no positive loops of contactomorphisms that are generated by a $C^0$-small Hamiltonian function., Comment: 10 pages, 1 figure

We prove the non--triviality of the Reeb flow for the (2n+1)--dimensional standard contact spheres inside the fundamental group of their contactomorphism group, n greater than 3. The argument uses the existence of homotopically non--trivial 2--spheres in the space of contact structures of a 3--Sasakian manifold., Comment: 8 pages

In this article we develop tools to compute the Geometric Quantization of a symplectic manifold with respect to a regular Lagrangian foliation via sheaf cohomology and obtain important new applications in the case of real polarizations. The starting point is the definition of representation spaces due to Kostant. Besides the classical examples of Gelfand-Cetlin systems due to Guillemin and Sternberg very few examples of explicit computations of real polarizations are known. The computation of Geometric Quantization for Gelfand-Cetlin systems is based on a theorem due to \'Sniatycki for fibrations which identifies the representation space with the set of Bohr-Sommerfeld leaves determined by the integral action coordinates. In this article we check that the associated sheaf cohomology apparatus of Geometric Quantization satisfies Mayer-Vietoris and K\"unneth formulae. As a consequence, a new short proof of this classical result for fibrations due to \'Sniatycki is obtained. We also compute Geometric Quantization with respect to any generic regular Lagrangian foliation on a 2-torus and the case of the irrational flow. In the way, we recover some classical results in the computation of foliated cohomology of these polarizations., Comment: 35 pages, 4 figures, minor changes

These notes are intended to be an introduction to the use of approximately holomorphic techniques in almost contact and contact geometry. We develop the setup of the approximately holomorphic geometry. Once done, we sketch the existence of the two main geometric decompositions available for an almost contact or contact manifold: open books and Lefschetz pencils. The use of the two decompositions for the problem of existence of contact structures is mentioned., Comment: 30 pages, 2 figures

We provide various definitions for the contact blow--up. Such different approaches to the contact blow--up are related. Some uniqueness and non--uniqueness results are also provided., Comment: 23 pages, 2 figures. Minor changes made in the last version

We prove that every homotopy class of almost contact structures on a closed 5-dimensional manifold admits a contact structure., Comment: There have been changes in the structure of the article

The well-known tubular neighborhood theorem for contact submanifolds states that a small enough neighborhood of such a submanifold N is uniquely determined by the contact structure on N, and the conformal symplectic structure of the normal bundle. In particular, if the submanifold N has trivial normal bundle then its tubular neighborhood will be contactomorphic to a neighborhood of Nx{0} in the model space NxR^{2k}. In this article we make the observation that if (N,\xi_N) is a 3-dimensional overtwisted submanifold with trivial normal bundle in (M,\xi), and if its model neighborhood is sufficiently large, then (M,\xi) does not admit an exact symplectic filling., Comment: 19 pages, 2 figures; added example of manifold that is not fillable by neighborhood criterium; typos

Recently there has been renewed interest among differential geometers in the theory of Engel structures. We introduce holomorphic analogues of these structures, and pose the problem of classifying projective manifolds admitting them. Besides providing the basic properties of these varieties, we present two series of examples and characterize them by certain positivity conditions on the Engel structure.

Is is known that the loop space associated to a Riemannian manifold admits a quasi-symplectic structure. This article shows that this structure is not likely to recover the underlying Riemannian metric by proving a result that is a strong indication of the "almost" independence of the quasi-symplectic structure with respect to the metric. Finally conditions to have contact structures on these spaces are studied., Comment: Final version. To appear in Proceedings of Math. Sci. Indian Academy of Sciences

A geometric obstruction, the so called "plastikstufe", for a contact structure to not being fillable has been found by K. Niederkruger. This generalizes somehow the concept of overtwisted structure to dimensions higher than 3. This paper elaborates on the theory showing a big number of closed contact manifolds with a "plastikstufe". They are the first examples of non-fillable contact closed high-dimensional manifolds. In particular we show that $S^3 \times \prod_j \Sigma_{j}$, for $g(\Sigma_j)\geq 2$, possesses this kind of contact structure and so any connected sum with those manifolds also does it., Comment: 19 pages, 4 figures

Given a Lagrangian submanifold in a symplectic manifold and a Morse function on the submanifold, we show that there is an isotopic Morse function and a symplectic Lefschetz pencil on the manifold extending the Morse function to the whole manifold. From this construction we define a sequence of symplectic invariants classifying the isotopy classes of Lagrangian spheres in a symplectic 4-manifold., Comment: 40 pages, 1 figure

We study some asymptotic properties of the sequences of symplectic Lefschetz pencils constructed by Donaldson. In particular we prove that the vanishing spheres of these pencils are, for large degree, conjugated under the action of the symplectomorphism group of the fiber. This implies the non-existence of homologically trivial vanishing spheres in these pencils. Moreover we show some basic topological properties of the space of asymptotically holomorphic transverse sections. These properties allow us to define a new set of symplectic invariants of the original symplectic structure.

We define the concept of symplectic foliation on a symplectic manifold and provide a method of constructing many examples, by using asymptotically holomorphic techniques.

We prove a Lefschetz hyperplane theorem for the determinantal loci of a morphism between two holomorphic vector bundles $E$ and $F$ over a complex manifold under the condition that $E^*\ox F$ is Griffiths $k$-positive. We apply this result to find some homotopy groups of the Brill-Noether loci for a generic curve., Comment: (one small mistake corrected)

We construct symplectic submanifolds of symplectic manifolds with contact border. The boundary of such submanifolds is shown to be a contact submanifold of the contact border. We also give a topological characterization of the constructed submanifolds by means of a ``relative Lefschetz hyperplane Theorem''. We sketch some of the applications of the results., Comment: 21 pages

We define the concept of Lefschetz contact pencil and we show the existence of such structures on any contact manifold. The main idea of the proof is a generalization of the Donaldson arguments used in the symplectic case. We will analyze some of the applications of such existence theorem for the topology of approximately holomorphic contact submanifolds., Comment: 26 pages, 1 figure

Unitary representations of the fundamental group of a Kahler manifold correspond to polystable vector bundles (with vanishing Chern classes). Semisimple linear representations correspond to polystable Higgs bundles. In this paper we find the objects corresponding to affine representations: the linear part gives a Higgs bundle and the translation part corresponds to an element of a generalized de Rham cohomology., Comment: 13 pages, LaTeX2e