Otto van Koert

Contact geometry of the restricted three-body problem

We show that the planar circular restricted three body problem is of restricted contact type for all energies below the first critical value (action of the first Lagrange point) and for energies slightly above it. This opens up the possibility of using the technology of Contact Topology to understand this particular dynamical system.

Brieskorn manifolds in contact topology

In this survey, we give an overview of Brieskorn manifolds and varieties, and their role in contact topology. We discuss open books, fillings and invariants such as contact and symplectic homology. We also present some new results involving exotic contact structures, invariants and orderability. The main tool for the required computations is a version of the Morse-Bott spectral sequence. We provide a proof for the particular version that is useful for us.

Global Surfaces of Section in the Planar Restricted 3-Body Problem

The restricted planar three-body problem has a rich history, yet many unanswered questions still remain. In the present paper we prove the existence of a global surface of section near the smaller body in a new range of energies and mass ratios for which the Hill’s region still has three connected components. The approach relies on recent global methods in symplectic geometry and contrasts sharply with the perturbative methods used until now.

CONTACT HOMOLOGY OF LEFT-HANDED STABILIZATIONS AND PLUMBING OF OPEN BOOKS

We show that on any closed contact manifold of dimension greater than 1 a contact structure with vanishing contact homology can be constructed. The basic idea for the construction comes from Giroux. We use a special open book decomposition for spheres. The page is the cotangent bundle of a sphere and the monodromy is given by a left-handed Dehn twist. In the resulting contact manifold we exhibit a closed Reeb orbit that bounds a single finite energy plane. As a result, the unit element of the contact homology algebra is exact and so the contact homology vanishes. This result can be extended to other contact manifolds by using connected sums. The latter is related to the plumbing- or 2-Murasugi sum of the contact open books. We shall give a possible description of this construction and some conjectures about the plumbing operation.

Open book decompositions for contact structures on Brieskorn manifolds

In this paper, we give an open book decomposition for the contact. structures on some Brieskorn manifolds, in particular for the contact structures of Ustilovsky. The decomposition uses right-handed Dehn twists as conjectured by Giroux.

The Conley–Zehnder indices of the rotating Kepler problem

We determine the Conley–Zehnder indices of all periodic orbits of the rotating Kepler problem for energies below the critical Jacobi energy. Consequently, we show the universal cover of the bounded component of the regularized energy hypersurface is dynamically convex. Moreover, in the universal cover there is always precisely one periodic orbit with Conley–Zehnder index 3, namely the lift of the doubly covered retrograde circular orbit.

Contact homology of Brieskorn manifolds

We give an algorithm for computing the contact homology of some Brieskorn manifolds. As an application, we construct infinitely many contact structures on the class of simply connected contact manifolds that admit nice contact forms (i.e. no Reeb orbits of degree -1,0 or 1) and have index positivity with trivial first Chern class.We give an algorithm for computing the contact homology of some Brieskorn manifolds. Brieskorn manifolds can be regarded as circle-bundles over orbifolds and our algorithm expresses cylindrical contact homology of the Brieskorn manifold in terms of the homology of the underlying orbifold. As an application, we construct infinitely many contact structures on the class of simply connected contact manifolds that admit nice contact forms (i.e. no Reeb orbits of degree 1, 0 or 1) and have index positivity with trivial first Chern class. 1991 Mathematics Subject Classification: 53D10.

Displaceability and the mean Euler characteristic

In this note we show that the mean Euler characteristic of equivariant symplectic homology is an effective obstruction against the existence of displaceable exact contact embeddings. As an application we show that certain Brieskorn manifolds do not admit displaceable exact contact embeddings.

Diagrams for contact 5-manifolds

According to Giroux, contact manifolds can be described as open books whose pages are Stein manifolds. For 5-dimensional contact manifolds the pages are Stein surfaces, which permit a description via Kirby diagrams. We introduce handle moves on such diagrams that do not change the corresponding contact manifold. As an application, we derive classification results for subcritically Stein fillable contact 5-manifolds and characterise the standard contact structure on the 5-sphere in terms of such fillings. This characterisation is discussed in the context of the Andrews-Curtis conjecture concerning presentations of the trivial group. We further illustrate the use of such diagrams by a covering theorem for simply connected spin 5-manifolds and a new existence proof for contact structures on simply connected 5-manifolds.

Periodic orbits in the restricted three-body problem and Arnold’s J + -invariant

We apply Arnold’s theory of generic smooth plane curves to Stark–Zeeman systems. This is a class of Hamiltonian dynamical systems that describes the dynamics of an electron in an external electric and magnetic field, and includes many systems from celestial mechanics. Based on Arnold’s J+-invariant, we introduce invariants of periodic orbits in planar Stark–Zeeman systems and study their behavior.