Orderable Contact Structures on Liouville-fillable Contact Manifolds

Abstract

We study the existence of positive loops of contactomorphisms on a Liouville-fillable contact manifold $(\Sigma,\xi=\ker(\alpha))$. Previous results show that a large class of Liouville-fillable contact manifolds admit contractible positive loops. In contrast, we show that for any Liouville-fillable $(\Sigma,\alpha)$ with $\dim(\Sigma) \geq 7$, there exists a Liouville-fillable contact structure $\xi'$ on $\Sigma$ which admits no positive loop at all. Further, $\xi'$ can be chosen to agree with $\xi$ on the complement of a Darboux ball.