Morse relations and Fredholm deformations of \(v\)-convex contact forms (Q2254875)

In this long paper the author studies a variational problem whose critical points are related to the periodic orbits of the Reeb vector field on a compact contact manifold. A long-standing conjecture by Alan Weinstein states that every such vector field has at least one closed integral curve. Such a variational problem has many features which prevent the use of the standard variational methods. The conjecture is currently open in its full generality, but has been confirmed in several specific settings, in particular for all 3-dimensional closed contact manifolds, by \textit{C. H. Taubes} [Geom. Topol. 11, 2117--2202 (2007; Zbl 1135.57015)]. The paper under review is part of a series of works of the author in which he develops another variational approach to deal with the action functional in the 3-dimensional case. It is divided in two main parts. The first part concerns Fredholm and compactness issues for this variational approach. The second part concerns the issue of existence of periodic orbits for the Reeb vector field under some index hypotheses. The author claims that an appropriate generalization of the arguments in the paper provides a new proof of Taubes' theorem on Weinstein's conjecture for closed contact 3-manifolds with finite fundamental group. The author recently published an erratum [Arab. J. Math. 4, No. 1, 77--79 (2015; Zbl 1451.53102)] since, unfortunately, the arguments of original article for the conclusions (iii) and (iv) of Theorem 1.3 are not complete.