A note on the volume flux of smooth and continuous strictly contact isotopies

Abstract

This note on the flux homomorphism for strictly contact isotopies complements the recent paper [MS11a] by P. Spaeth and the author. We determine the volume flux restricted to symplectic and volume-preserving contact isotopies and their C^0-limits for some classes of symplectic and contact manifolds and for a number of examples. In particular, we see that the restriction of the flux may fail to be surjective. It vanishes for an isotopy preserving a regular contact form, but can be nontrivial for non-regular contact forms. Applications are discussed in the article cited above. We also find obstructions to regularizing a strictly contact isotopy that are not present for Hamiltonian isotopies [Pol01, Section 5.2] or contact isotopies [MS11b].