Chekanov’s dichotomy in contact topology

Abstract

In this paper we study submanifolds of contact manifolds. The main submanifolds we are interested in are contact coisotropic submanifolds. Based on a correspondence between symplectic and contact coisotropic submanifolds, we can show contact coisotropic submanifolds admit a $C^0$-rigidity, similar to Humili\`ere-Leclercq-Seyfaddini's coisotropic rigidity on symplectic manifolds. Moreover, based on Shelukhin's norm defined on the contactomorphism group, we define a Chekanov type pseudo-metric on the orbit space of a fixed submanifold of a contact manifold. Moreover, we can show a dichotomy of (non-)degeneracy of this pseudo-metric when the dimension of this fixed submanifold is equal to the one for a Legendrian submanifold. This can be viewed as a contact topology analogue to Chekanov's dichotomy of (non-)degeneracy of Chekanov-Hofer's metric on the orbit space of a Lagrangian submanifold.