Partially ordered groups and geometry of contact transformations (Q5930039)

The authors of the paper study and describe a class of contact manifolds having the property that the universal cover of its group of contact diffeomorphisms carries a natural partial order, and hence they can use some methods of the theory of partially ordered groups. Consequently they uncover a new viewpoint on geometry and dynamics of contactomorphisms. This gives rise to invariants of contactomorphisms which generalize the classical notion of the rotation number.