Fundamental groups of formal Legendrian and horizontal embedding spaces

Abstract

We compute the fundamental group of each connected component of the space of formal Legendrian embeddings in R3. We use it to show that previous examples in the literature of non trivial loops of Legendrian embeddings are already non trivial at the formal level. Likewise, we compute the fundamental group of the different connected components of the space of formal horizontal embeddings into the standard Engel R4. We check that this computes the fundamental group of the space of horizontal embeddings as well.