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

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)].