Strongly Invertible Legendrian Links

Abstract

We introduce and study strongly invertible Legendrian links in the standard contact three-dimensional space. We establish the equivariant analogs of basic results separately well-known for strongly invertible and Legendrian links, i.e. the existence of transvergent front diagrams, an equivariant Legendrian Reidemeister theorem, and an equivariant stabilization theorem \`a la Fuch-Tabachnikov. We also introduce a maximal equivariant Thurston-Bennequin number for strongly invertible links and we exhibit infinitely many such links for which the invariant coincides with the usual maximal Thurston-Bennequin number. We conjecture that such a coincidence does not hold general and that there exist strongly invertible knots having Legendrian representatives isotopic to their reversed Legendrian mirrors but not isotopic to any strongly invertible Legendrian knot.