Maximal Page Crossing Numbers of Legendrian Surfaces in Closed Contact 5-Manifolds

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new Legendrian isotopy invariant for surfaces in 5-manifolds, enabling distinction of Legendrian surfaces beyond traditional invariants like Thurston-Bennequin.

Contribution

It defines the Relative and Absolute Maximal Page Crossing Numbers as novel invariants for Legendrian surfaces in 5-manifolds, extending the toolkit for distinguishing Legendrian embeddings.

Findings

Invariant distinguishes Legendrian surfaces not separable by Thurston-Bennequin invariant.

The invariant is preserved under Legendrian isotopies.

Applicable to surfaces in standard five-sphere with open book decompositions.

Abstract

We introduce a new Legendrian isotopy invariant for any closed orientable Legendrian surface $L$ embedded in a closed contact $5$-manifold $(M, \xi)$ which admits an "admissable" open book $(B, f)$ (supporting $\xi$) for $L$. We show that to any such $L$ and a fixed page $X$, one can assign an integer $M\mathcal{P}_{X}(L)$, called "Relative Maximal Page Crossing Number of $L$ with respect to $X$", which is invariant under Legendrian isotopies of $L$. We also show that one can extend this to a page-free invariant, i.e., one can assign an integer $M\mathcal{P}_{(B,f)}(L)$, called "Absolute Maximal Page Crossing Number of $L$ with respect to $(B, f)$", which is invariant under Legendrian isotopies of $L$. In particular, this new invariant distinguishes Legendrian surfaces in the standard five-sphere which can not be distinguished by Thurston-Bennequin invariant.