Contact integral geometry and the Heisenberg algebra

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Abstract: Generalizing Weyl's tube formula and building on Chern's work, Alesker reinterpreted the Lipschitz-Killing curvature integrals as a family of valuations (finitely-additive measures with good analytic properties), attached canonically to any Riemannian manifold, which is universal with respect to isometric embeddings. In this note, we uncover a similar structure for contact manifolds. Namely, we show that a contact manifold admits a canonical family of generalized valuations, which are universal under contact embeddings. Those valuations assign numerical invariants to even-dimensional submanifolds, which in a certain sense measure the curvature at points of tangency to the contact structure. Moreover, these valuations generalize to the class of manifolds equipped with the structure of a Heisenberg algebra on their cotangent bundle. Pursuing the analogy with Euclidean integral geometry, we construct symplectic-invariant distributions on Grassmannians to produce Crofton formulas on the contact sphere. Using closely related distributions, we obtain Crofton formulas also in the linear symplectic space.


A generalized valuation theory for contact manifolds is developed. It is shown that some invariants on even-dimensional submanifolds of contact manifolds are connected in the sense of this theory with the contact structure. It is also shown that these valuations generalize to the structures of Heisenberg algebras that are induced on cotangent bundles. Crofton formulae on the contact sphere and on the linear symplectic spaces are obtained.



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