Foliated compressing discs for Legendrian rational tangles (Q2809224)

The paper under review considers Legendrian rational tangles with respect to the standard contact structure on \(S^3\). There is an operation called ``flyping'' defined on rational tangles which does not change the topological isotopy class but may change the Legendrian isotopy class of a tangle. The paper under review establishes a diagrammatic approach to decide in some cases whether there is a Legendrian isotopy from a tangle to one of its flypes. The author considers so-called ``compressing discs'' for a rational tangle and their characteristic foliations (with respect to the contact structure), and he develops a theory of so-called ``box-dot diagrams'' to encode the information coming from those characteristic foliations. Some technical lemmas provide the connection between the box-dot diagrams and the existence of an Legendrian isotopy, and some partial results on the classification of Legendrian flypes up to Legendrian isotopy are obtained. For example, if two regular Legendrian rational tangles differ only by vertical Legendrian flypes, then they are Legendrian isotopic.