Deformations of special Legendrian submanifolds with boundary (Q470091)

\textit{A. Tomassini} and \textit{L. Vezzoni} [Osaka J. Math. 45, No. 1, 127--147 (2008; Zbl 1146.53051)] introduced the concept of contact Calabi-Yau manifold, a \((2n+1)\)-dimensional Sasakian manifold \((M,\alpha, J,\epsilon)\) with a contact structure \(\alpha\) and an endomorphism \(J\) defining a compatible complex structure on the contact distribution \(\xi=\mathrm{Ker}\, \alpha\) calibrated by \(\kappa=d\alpha/2\), \(J\) vanishing on the Reeb vector field \(R_{\alpha}\), and endowed with a closed basic complex volume form \(\epsilon\in \Lambda_J^{n,0}(\xi)\), that is \(\epsilon\wedge \bar{\epsilon}=(-1)^{n(n+1)/2}(2i)^n \kappa^n/n!\). They proved that the moduli space of special closed Legendrian submanifolds of a contact Calabi-Yau manifold is a smooth one-dimensional manifold. The authors of the present paper study the deformation problem of a compact special Legendrian submanifold \(L\) with boundary in \(M\) when the boundary \(\partial L\) is confined on a scaffold \(W\) of codimension two. A special Legendrian submanifold is an embedding \(j:L^n\to M\) satisfying \(j^*\alpha= j^* \mathrm{Im}\,\epsilon =0\), or equivalently it is calibrated by \(\mathrm{Re}\, \epsilon\), and the scaffold is a contact submanifold \((W,\xi')\) such that the sympletic orthogonal complement \({\xi'}^{\bot}\) of \(\xi'\) on \(\xi\) is a trivial bundle, and the inward unit normal \(N\) of \(\partial L\) in \(L\) is a smooth section of it. It turns out that \(\partial L\) is a Legendrian submanifold of \(W\). If \(j_t:L\to M\) is a deformation that keeps \(\partial L\) inside \(W\) for all \(t\), they prove that the deformation vector \(V\) satisfies the Neumann boundary condition \(d\alpha (N, V)=0\), that implies that \(\alpha(V|_{\partial L})=0\). In Theorem 1.1 the authors prove a rigidity result, namely that the moduli space of a special Legendrian submanifold \(j:L\to M\) with boundary inside a scaffold \(W\) of codimension 2 consists only of \(j\). By considering a weaker boundary condition, namely that if \(V\) is a normal vector field to \(L\) with \(\alpha(V)|_{\partial L}\) constant, then they show in Theorem 1.2 that \(V\) is the infinitesimal deformation vector field to a normal deformation through special Legendrian submanifolds if and only if \(\alpha(V)\) is constant. Furthermore, the tangent space of such deformations is the real one-dimensional space spanned by \(R_{\alpha}\) and is given by isometries generated by \(R_{\alpha}\). The proofs rely on a deformation of the scaffold, using a suitable new metric that makes \(W\) totally geodesic, inspired in some results of \textit{A. Butscher} [Proc. Am. Math. Soc. 131, No. 6, 1953--1964 (2003; Zbl 1031.53111)], and inspection of consequences of the equation \(d\alpha (N,V)=0\).