Joint IAS-PU Symplectic Geometry Seminar

Legendrian Contact Homology (LCH) was among the first, and is still among the most important, non-classical invariants of Legendrian knots. In this talk, I will tell a story that builds up ever more sophisticated analogues of Poincare Duality in LCH...

In the late '90s, Eliashberg and Thurston established a remarkable connection between foliations and contact structures in dimension three: any co-oriented, aspherical foliation on a closed, oriented 3-manifold can be approximated by positive and...

A Lagrangian cobordism between Legendrian knots is an important notion in symplectic geometry. Many questions, including basic structural questions about these surfaces are yet unanswered. For instance, while it is known that these cobordisms form a...

Contact homology is a Floer-type invariant for contact manifolds, and is a part of Symplectic Field Theory. One of its first applications was the existence of exotic contact structures on spheres. Originally, contact homology was defined only for...

Given an area-preserving surface diffeomorphism, what can one say about the topological properties of its periodic orbits? In particular, a finite set of periodic orbits gives rise to a braid in the mapping torus, and one can ask which isotopy...

I will discuss work in progress with Morgan Weiler on knot filtered embedded contact homology (ECH) of open book decompositions of S^3 along T(2,q) torus knots to deduce information about the dynamics of symplectomorphisms of the genus (q-1)/2 pages...

The four dimensional ellipsoid embedding function of a toric symplectic manifold M measures when a symplectic ellipsoid embeds into M. It generalizes the Gromov width and ball packing numbers. This function can have a property called an infinite...

ECH capacities have found many applications to symplectic embedding problems, most of which in the toric setting. I will discuss a new application of ECH to studying optimal embeddings for non-toric rational surfaces. The key convex geometric...

An Anosov flow Φ on a closed 3-manifold M gives rise to a non-Weinstein Liouville structure on V:=[−1,1]×M. Building upon the work of Hozoori, we establish a homotopy correspondence between Anosov flows and certain pairs of contact forms. Moreover...

I shall present two billiard-like systems associated with a convex hypersurface in a symplectic space, the outer and an inner ones.  The talk will survey the known results and focus on open problems.