Invariants of Legendrian and transverse knots in the standard contact space (Q1356378)

Given a contact structure on a 3-manifold, in particular a continuous distribution of 2-dimensional subspaces of tangent spaces, one distinguishes between curves which are transverse resp. tangent to the distribution (transverse resp. Legendrian curves). Under certain hypotheses, for Legendrian knots one has two integer-valued Legendrian isotopy invariants (i.e. isotopy via Legendrian knots): the rotation or Maslov number (which measures the number of revolutions of the tangent vector of the curve with respect to a chosen framing of the planes of the contact distribution) and the Bennequin number (the contact self-linking number of the knot). For transverse knots, only Bennequin numbers are defined. Considering the standard contact structure in 3-space \(\mathbb{R}^3\), the present well-written and interesting paper centers around the question if, in a given topological isotopy class of knots, Legendrian knots are determined by their Maslov and Bennequin numbers, up to Legendrian isotopy (similar for transverse knots, Bennequin numbers and transverse isotopy). By a result of Eliashberg, this is true for trivial knots (but not, in general, for 3-manifolds different from \(\mathbb{R}^3)\). One of the main results of the paper gives evidence for this by proving that the answer is positive at the level of Grothendieck groups: considering the commutative semigroups of knots with respect to the connected sum, their Grothendieck groups are isomorphic to the Grothendieck group of topological knots plus \(\mathbb{Z} \oplus \mathbb{Z}\) (Bennequin and Maslov in the Legendrian case), resp. plus \(\mathbb{Z}\) (Bennequin) in the transverse case. Another main result of the paper says that topologically isotopic Legendrian knots with equal Bennequin and Maslov numbers cannot be distinguished by finite-order Legendrian knot invariants (finite order in the sense of Vassiliev). Also, as a combination of known results, upper estimates of the Bennequin number of a transverse link in terms of its HOMFLY-polynomial, and of a Legendrian link in terms of its Kauffman polynomial are given. This allows, for example, to find the maximal value of the Bennequin number of a transverse or Legendrian realization of the mirror trefoil knot (a problem known since Bennequin's seminal paper of 1983 on knots in contact geometry), and also implies that the Bennequin invariant of a topologically unknotted transverse or Legendrian knot is always negative (giving a short and elementary proof of the existence of an exotic contact structure in \(\mathbb{R}^3)\).