Paper detail

Gravitational descendants in symplectic field theory

It was pointed out by Y. Eliashberg in his ICM 2006 plenary talk that the rich algebraic formalism of symplectic field theory leads to a natural appearance of quantum and classical integrable systems, at least in the case when the contact manifold is the prequantization space of a symplectic manifold. In this paper we generalize the definition of gravitational descendants in SFT from circle bundles in the Morse-Bott case to general contact manifolds. After we have shown that for the basic examples of holomorphic curves in SFT, that is, branched covers of cylinders over closed Reeb orbits, the gravitational descendants have a geometric interpretation in terms of branching conditions, we compute the corresponding sequences of Poisson-commuting functions when the contact manifold is the unit cotangent bundle of a Riemannian manifold.