Equivariant and nonequivariant contact homology

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Jo Nelson, Rice University
IAS - Simonyi Hall Seminar Room SH-101

I will discuss joint work with Hutchings which constructs nonequivariant and a family floer equivariant version of contact homology.  Both theories are generated by two copies of each Reeb orbit over Z and capture interesting torsion information. I will then explain how one can recover the original cylindrical theory proposed by Eliashberg-Givental-Hofer via our construction.