Sutured ECH is a natural invariant

We show that sutured embedded contact homology is a natural invariant of sutured contact 3 3 -manifolds which can potentially detect some of the topology of the space of contact structures on a 3 3 -manifold with boundary. The appendix, by C. H. Taubes, proves a compactness result for the completion of a sutured contact 3 3 -manifold in the context of Seiberg–Witten Floer homology, which enables us to complete the proof of naturality.

Reeb orbits that force topological entropy

We develop a forcing theory of topological entropy for Reeb flows in dimension three. A transverse link L in a closed contact $3$ -manifold $(Y,\xi )$ is said to force topological entropy if $(Y,\xi )$ admits a Reeb flow with vanishing topological entropy, and every Reeb flow on $(Y,\xi )$ realizing L as a set of periodic Reeb orbits has positive topological entropy. Our main results establish topological conditions on a transverse link L, which imply that L forces topological entropy. These conditions are formulated in terms of two Floer theoretical invariants: the cylindrical contact homology on the complement of transverse links introduced by Momin [A. Momin. J. Mod. Dyn.5 (2011), 409–472], and the strip Legendrian contact homology on the complement of transverse links, introduced by Alves [M. R. R. Alves. PhD Thesis, Université Libre de Bruxelles, 2014] and further developed here. We then use these results to show that on every closed contact $3$ -manifold that admits a Reeb flow with vanishing topological entropy, there exist transverse knots that force topological entropy.

Sub-leading asymptotics of ECH capacities

In previous work (Cristofaro-Gardiner et al. in Invent Math 199:187–214, 2015), the first author and collaborators showed that the leading asymptotics of the embedded contact homology spectrum recovers the contact volume. Our main theorem here is a new bound on the sub-leading asymptotics.

2-Knot homology and Yoshikawa move

Ng constructed an invariant of knots in [Formula: see text], a combinatorial knot contact homology. Extending his study, we construct an invariant of surface-knots in [Formula: see text] using marked graph diagrams.

Cellular Legendrian contact homology for surfaces, part II

This paper is a continuation of [Cellular computation of Legendrian contact homology for surfaces, preprint (2016)]. For Legendrian surfaces in [Formula: see text]-jet spaces, we prove that the Cellular DGA defined in [Cellular computation of Legendrian contact homology for surfaces, preprint (2016)] is stable tame isomorphic to the Legendrian contact homology DGA, modulo the explicit construction of a specific Legendrian surface. In [Cellular computation of Legendrian contact homology for surfaces, to appear in Internat. J. Math.], we construct this surface, thereby completing Theorem 5.1 and the proof of the isomorphism.