Anosov flows and Liouville pairs in dimension three

Abstract

Building upon the work of Mitsumatsu and Hozoori, we establish a complete homotopy correspondence between three-dimensional Anosov flows and certain pairs of contact forms that we call Anosov Liouville pairs. We show a similar correspondence between projectively Anosov flows and bi-contact structures, extending the work of Mitsumatsu and Eliashberg-Thurston. As a consequence, every Anosov flow on a closed oriented three-manifold $M$ gives rise to a Liouville structure on $\mathbb{R} \times M$ which is well-defined up to homotopy, and which only depends on the homotopy class of the Anosov flow. Our results also provide a new perspective on the classification problem of Anosov flows in dimension three.