Bifurcations on contact manifolds

Abstract

Consider a 1-parameter compactly supported family of Legendrian submanifolds of the 1-jet bundle of a compact manifold with its natural contact structure and a path of intersection points of the Legendrian family with the 1-jet of a constant function. Since the contact distribution is a symplectic vector bundle, it is possible to assign a Maslov-type index to the intersection path. We show that the non-vanishing of the Maslov intersection index implies that there exists at least one point of bifurcation from the given path of intersection points. This result can be viewed as a kind of analogue in bifurcation theory of the Arnold-Sandon conjecture on intersections of Legendrian submanifols. The proof is based on the technique of generating functions that relates the properties of Hamiltonian diffeomorphisms to the Morse theory of the associated functions.