Seminars & Colloquia Calendar

Abstract:  Contact homology is an invariant of contact manifolds, constructed by counting punctured J-holomorphic curves in the symplectization of contact manifolds. Recently, Pardon have developed a foundational framework called implicit atlas and virtual fundamental cycle (VFC), and applied it to rigorously define contact homology in the case when Reeb orbits are non-degenerate, addressing transversality issues. In the Morse-Bott case, when Reeb orbits come in families of manifolds, contact homology was first defined by Bourgeois. In this talk, I will use Pardon's VFC technique to construct Morse-Bott contact homology. Some key ingredients are a combinatorial description of stratification of moduli spaces of "cascades", and a gluing theorem of J-holomorphic curves.