Neighborhoods of transverse knots and destabilizations

Abstract

In this note, we show that transverse knots have unique standard neighborhoods and prove a structure theorem about non-loose Legendrian knots. We also prove a finiteness result for transverse knots in a tight contact manifold. The common theme of these two results is a general destabilization result for Legendrian knots. As a byproduct of this work, we find a manifold with an infinite number of distinct tight contact structures, up to contactomoprhism, with no Giroux torsion.