A Boothby–Wang Theorem for Besse Contact Manifolds

A Reeb flow on a contact manifold is called Besse if all its orbits are periodic, possibly with different periods. We characterize contact manifolds whose Reeb flows are Besse as principal $$S^1$$ S 1 -orbibundles over integral symplectic orbifolds satisfying some cohomological condition. Apart from the cohomological condition, this statement appears in the work of Boyer and Galicki in the language of Sasakian geometry (Boyer and Galicki in Sasakian geometry, Oxford Mathematical Monographs, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2008). We illustrate some non-commonly dealt with perspective on orbifolds in a proof of the above result. More precisely, we work with orbifolds as quotients of manifolds by smooth Lie group actions with finite stabilizer groups. By introducing all relevant orbifold notions in this equivariant way, we avoid patching constructions with orbifold charts. As an application, and building on work by Cristofaro-Gardiner–Mazzucchelli, we deduce a complete classification of closed Besse contact 3-manifolds up to strict contactomorphism.

Contact Structures of Sasaki Type and Their Associated Moduli

This article is based on a talk at the RIEMain in Contact conference in Cagliari, Italy in honor of the 78th birthday of David Blair one of the founders of modern Riemannian contact geometry. The present article is a survey of a special type of Riemannian contact structure known as Sasakian geometry. An ultimate goal of this survey is to understand the moduli of classes of Sasakian structures as well as the moduli of extremal and constant scalar curvature Sasaki metrics, and in particular the moduli of Sasaki-Einstein metrics.

Brieskorn manifolds, positive Sasakian geometry, and contact topology

Using ${S^{1}}$-equivariant symplectic homology, in particular its mean Euler characteristic, of the natural filling of links of Brieskorn–Pham polynomials, we prove the existence of infinitely many inequivalent contact structures on various manifolds, including in dimension 5 the k-fold connected sums of ${S^{2}\times S^{3}}$ and certain rational homology spheres. We then apply our result to show that on these manifolds the moduli space of classes of positive Sasakian structures has infinitely many components. We also apply our results to give lower bounds on the number of components of the moduli space of Sasaki–Einstein metrics on certain homotopy spheres. Finally, a new family of Sasaki–Einstein metrics of real dimension 20 on ${S^{5}}$ is exhibited.