Contact topology in higher dimensions

May 21 to May 25, 2012

at the

American Institute of Mathematics, San Jose, California

organized by

John Etnyre, Emmanuel Giroux, and Klaus Niederkrueger

Original Announcement

This workshop will be devoted to developing high dimensional contact topology. While the existence of contact structures on 3-manifolds is well understood and we know quite a lot about properties of contact structures on 3-manifolds, very little is known about the nature of high dimensional contact topology, and even the basic existence questions for contact structures on higher dimensional manifolds are unknown except in a few cases.

The main topics for the workshop are

While little is known about any of this topics, there has recently been promising progress on all of them. This workshop will bring together experts in contact topology (especially ones contributing to the progress on these higher dimensional questions) as well as experts in high dimensional topology, symplectic field theory, and related areas, to energize research in high dimensional contact geometry.

Material from the workshop

A list of participants.

The workshop schedule.

A report on the workshop activities.

Slides from the talk The Existence Problem by Giroux.

Problem list prepared by Sylvain Courte.

Papers arising from the workshop:

The discriminant and oscillation lengths for contact and Legendrian isotopies
by  Vincent Colin and Sheila Sandon,  J. Eur. Math. Soc. (JEMS) 17 (2015), no. 7, 1657-1685  MR3361726
Quantitative Darboux theorems in contact geometry
by  John B. Etnyre, Rafal Komendarczyk, and Patrick Massot
Loose Legendrians and the plastikstufe
by  Emmy Murphy, Klaus Niederkr�ger, Olga Plamenevskaya, and Andr�s I. Stipsicz,  Geom. Topol. 17 (2013), no. 3, 1791-1814  MR3073936