Distinguishing Legendrian knots with trivial orientation-preserving symmetry group (Q6109283): Difference between revisions

As the authors note, deciding whether or not two Legendrian knots in \(S^3\) are equivalent (Legendrian isotopic, isotopic through Legendrian knots) can be difficult, in general; there are two major tools here, Legendrian knot invariants of algebraic nature and Giroux's convex surfaces endowed with the characteristic foliation [\textit{E. Giroux}, Invent. Math. 141, No. 3, 615--689 (2000; Zbl 1186.53097)]. Previous work by \textit{I. Dynnikov} and \textit{M. Prasolov} [J. Topol. 14, No. 3, 701--860 (2021; Zbl 1495.57002)] proposed a new combinatorial technique for dealing with Giroux's convex surfaces which requires, however, a substantial amount of technical work in each individual case (in particular, one needs to search all rectangular diagrams of surfaces realizing certain dividing configurations). In the present paper, ``we show that in the case when the orientation-preserving symmetry group of the knot is trivial, this exhaustive search is not needed, which simplifies the procedure considerably. This allow one to distinguish Legendrian knots in certain cases when the computation of the known algebraic invariants is infeasible or not informative. In particulaar, we disprove that when \(A \subset \mathbb R^3\) is an annulus tangent to the standard contact structure along \(\partial A\), then the two components of \(\partial A\) are always equivalent Legendrian knots. It is also shown here that the problem of comparing two Legendrian knots having the same topological type is algorithmically solvable provided that the orientation-presering symmetry group of these knots is trivial.''