On the contact mapping class group of the contactization of the \(A_m\)-Milnor fiber (Q1743737)

The aim of this paper is to construct an embedding of the full braid group on \(m+1\) strands \(B_{m+1}\), \(m\geq1\), into the contact mapping class group of the contactization \(Q\times S^1\) of the \(A_m\)-Milnor fiber \(Q\). The construction uses the embedding of \(B_{m+1}\) into the symplectic mapping class group of \(Q\) due to \textit{M. Khovanov} and \textit{P. Seidel} [J. Am. Math. Soc. 15, No. 1, 203--271 (2002; Zbl 1035.53122)], and a natural lifting homomorphism. In order to show that the composed homomorphism is still injective, the authors use a partially linearized variant of the Chekanov-Eliashberg dga for Legendrians which lie above one another in \(Q\times\mathbb{R}\), reducing the proof to Floer homology. As corollaries they obtain a contribution to the contact isotopy problem for \(Q\times S^1\), as well as the fact that in dimension 4, the lifting homomorphism embeds the symplectic mapping class group of \(Q\) into the contact mapping class group of \(Q\times S^1\). The paper is organized as follows: Section 1 is an introduction to the subject stating the main result. In Section 2, the authors gather the necessary preliminaries. The main technical tool they use is the dg bimodule associated to a two-component Legendrian link. This is a simplification of the Chekanov-Eliashberg dga, adapted to their geometric situation whereby the components of the link lie one above the other. The authors introduce all necessary algebraic definitions, namely the stable tame isomorphism type and linearized homology, analogously to the standard treatment in Legendrian contact homology. Finally, Section 3 contains the proof of the main result.