Sutures and contact homology. I. (Q640347)

The authors define relative versions of contact homology and embedded contact homology for contact manifolds with convex boundary and prove basic properties of these relative contact homology theories. Similar considerations also hold for embedded contact homology. Contact homology, due to Eliashberg and Hofer is a Floer-type invariant of closed contact manifolds. It is the homology of a differential graded algebra whose differential counts genus zero holomorphic curves in the symplectization with one positive puncture and an arbitrary number of negative punctures. Contact homology has been quite successful at distinguishing contact structures. Embedded contact homology (ECH) is a variant of contact homology and symplectic field theory for three-dimensional contact manifolds, defined by Hutchings, which is the homology of a chain complex whose differential counts certain embedded holomorphic curves, possible of higher genus, in the symplectization. Although ECH is defined in terms of a contact form, it is actually a topological invariant of the underlying 3-manifold, i.e., it does not depend on the contact structure (up to a possible grading shift). This invariance follows from a theorem of Taubes identifying ECH with Seiberg-Witten cohomology, which also implies the Weinstein conjecture in dimension three. The first result of the authors is that the contact homology algebra and, in the three-dimensional case, embedded contact homology can be defined for a contact manifold \((M,\Gamma, \xi )\) with convex boundary \(\partial M\), contact structure \(\xi\) and suture \(\Gamma\), extending the usual definitions. The authors propose the conjecture that sutured embedded contact homology does not depend on the choice of contact form, contact structure or almost complex structure. They also conjecture that, for sutured contact 3-manifolds, the sutured embedded contact homology is isomorphic to the sutured Floer homology of Juhasz for the corresponding relative \(\text{Spin}^c\) structure determined by the contact structure \(\xi \). The authors prove that performing a sutured manifold gluing leads to a canonical injection on the level of sutured contact homology and, in case \(\dim M=3\), also on the level of sutured embedded contact homology.