Legendrian embedded contact homology

Abstract

We give a construction of embedded contact homology (ECH) for a contact $3$-manifold $Y$ with convex sutured boundary and a pair of Legendrians $\Lambda_+$ and $\Lambda_-$ contained in $\partial Y$ satisfying an exactness condition. The chain complex is generated by certain configurations of closed Reeb orbits of $Y$ and Reeb chords of $\Lambda_+$ to $\Lambda_-$. The main ingredients include: a general Legendrian adjunction formula for curves in $\mathbb{R} \times Y$ with boundary on $\mathbb{R} \times \Lambda$; a relative writhe bound for curves in contact $3$-manifolds asymptotic to Reeb chords; and a Legendrian ECH index with an accompanying ECH index inequality. The (action filtered) Legendrian ECH of any pair $(Y,\Lambda)$ of a closed contact $3$-manifold $Y$ and a Legendrian link $\Lambda$ can also be defined using this machinery after passing to a sutured link complement. This work builds on ideas present in Colin-Ghiggini-Honda's proof of the equivalence of Heegaard-Floer homology and ECH. The independence of our construction of choices of almost complex structure and contact form should require a new flavor of monopole Floer homology. It is beyond the scope of this paper.