Georgia Institute of Technology College of Sciences

John Etnyre: "Embeddings of contact manifolds" Abstract: I will discuss recent results concerning embeddings and isotopies of one contact manifold into another. Such embeddings should be thought of as generalizations of transverse knots in 3-dimensional contact manifolds (where they have been instrumental in the development of our understanding of contact geometry). I will mainly focus on embeddings of contact 3-manifolds into contact 5-manifolds. In this talk I will discuss joint work with Ryo Furukawa aimed at using braiding techniques to study contact embeddings. Braided embeddings give an explicit way to represent some (maybe all) smooth embeddings and should be useful in computing various invariants. If time permits I will also discuss other methods for embedding and constructions one may perform on contact submanifolds. Dan Cristofaro-Gardiner: "Beyond the Weinstein conjecture" Abstract: The Weinstein conjecture states that any Reeb vector field on a closed manifold has at least one closed orbit. The three-dimensional case of this conjecture was proved by Taubes in 2007, and Hutchings and I later showed that in this case there are always at least 2 orbits. While examples exist with exactly two orbits, one expects that this lower bound can be significantly improved with additional assumptions. For example, a theorem of Hofer, Wysocki, and Zehnder states that a generic nondegenerate Reeb vector field associated to the standard contact structure on $S^3$ has either 2, or infinitely many, closed orbits. We prove that any nondegenerate Reeb vector field has 2 or infinitely many closed orbits as long as the associated contact structure has torsion first Chern class. This is joint work with Mike Hutchings and Dan Pomerleano.