On the contact homology of the first exotic contact form of J. Gonzalo and F. Varela (Q2254878): Difference between revisions

In the present work, the interest is to find conditions that allow the existence of periodic orbits of Reeb vector fields of a contact manifold. The author notes that there exists a sequence of contact structures \(\alpha_n\) which exhaust all contact structures on \(S^3\) [\textit{J. Gonzalo} and \textit{F. Varela}, Astérisque 107--108, 163--168 (1983; Zbl 0526.53042)]. Furthermore, there is a nonvanishing vector field \(v\) in the kernel of the first contact form \(\alpha_1\) of Gonzalo-Varela that commutes with a vector field defining a standard \(S^1\)-action on \(S^3\) [\textit{V. Martino}, Adv. Nonlinear Stud. 11, No. 1, 145--156 (2011; Zbl 1238.53062)]. The vector field \(v\) found by Martino has the following property: \(d\alpha_1(v,\cdot)\) is a contact form with the same orientationof \(\alpha_1\). Because of this property, the author studies the variations of a certain functional well defined on the loop space of \(S^3\). With this variational approach, it is proved that the contact homology is non-zero for a sequence of indexes tending to infinity, under the assumption that they can be connected to the first contact form through a path along which a special pseudo-gradient is assumed to verify a Fredholm condition. We note that the author wrote an erratum for this paper in [Adv. Nonlinear Stud. 14, No. 4, 857--871 (2014; Zbl 1309.53067)].