Cédric De Groote (Max Planck Institute, Leipzig) will speak in the geometry seminar on Tuesday 26 November 2019 at 11am in the Salle de Profs. Cédric’s title is Orderability up to conjugation of certain open contact manifolds and his abstract is below.
Eliashberg and Polterovich introduced in 2000 a notion of orderability for the group of contact isotopies of a contact manifold, which provides insights into the geometry of that group. Later, this same notion “up to conjugation” was used by Borman, Eliashberg and Murphy in their proof of the flexibility of overtwisted contact manifolds of all dimensions. I will review some of the history of that problem, and then present a new result on the orderability up to conjugation of certain contact annuli. This involves restating the problem as a contact non-squeezing result, which is then shown using a version of contact homology.