On the rotation class of knotted Legendrian tori in \(\mathbb{R}^5\) (Q2630442)

A Legendrian knot is a smooth embedding of the circle into \(\mathbb R^3\) that is compatible with the contact structure on \(\mathbb R^3\). A contact structure is a special type of plane field; it assigns to each point of the space an entire plane of directions and compatibility is that the tangent line to the knot at a point lies in the plane assigned to this point. The next step in such an approach are Legendrian surfaces in \(\mathbb R^5\). The present paper is devoted to knotted Legendrian tori in \(\mathbb R^5\) with the standard contact form. The theory of Legendrian knots in \(\mathbb R^3\) has developed some effective invariants such as the Thurston-Bennequin invariant and rotation numbers that distinguish many knots up to Legendrian isotopy. These invariants generalize to higher dimensions. The Thurston-Bennequin invariants for knotted Legendrian tori \( L\subset \mathbb R^5\) are trivial, while the rotation class asks computation of the homotopy class of maps from \(L\) to the space of Lagrangians of \(\mathbb R^4\). The authors overcome the difficulty. They define and use Lagrangian hypercube diagrams in order to construct Lagrangian tori in \(\mathbb R^4\) that lift to Legendrian tori in \(\mathbb R^5\). This way they show how to combinatorially compute the rotational class of a large family of Legendrian tori in \(\mathbb R^5\) with the standard contact form. Besides this they obtain formulae to compute the Maslov index for any loop on the torus.