Brieskorn Manifolds, Positive Sasakian Geometry, and Contact Topology

Abstract

Using $S^1$-equivariant symplectic homology, in particular its mean Euler characteristic, of the natural filling of links of Brieskorn-Pham polynomials, we prove the existence of infinitely many inequivalent contact structures on various manifolds, including in dimension 5 the k-fold connected sums of $S^2\times S^3$ and certain rational homology spheres. We then apply our result to show that on these manifolds the moduli space of classes of positive Sasakian structures has infinitely many components. We also apply our results to give lower bounds on the number of components of the moduli space of Sasaki-Einstein metrics on certain homotopy spheres. Finally a new family of Sasaki-Einstein metrics of real dimension 20 on $S^5$ is exhibited.