Orderability, contact non-squeezing, and Rabinowitz Floer homology

Abstract

We study Liouville fillable contact manifolds $(\Sigma ,\xi )$ with non-zero Rabinowitz Floer homology and assign spectral numbers to paths of contactomorphisms. As a consequence we prove that $\widetilde{{\mathrm{Cont}}_0}(\Sigma ,\xi )$ is orderable in the sense of Eliashberg and Polterovich. This provides a new class of orderable contact manifolds. If the contact manifold is in addition periodic or a prequantization space $M\times S^1$ for $M$ a Liouville manifold, then we construct a contact capacity. This can be used to prove a general non-squeezing result, which amongst other examples in particular recovers the beautiful non-squeezing results from [EKP06].

38 pages, 1 figure, v2: major revision