Contact homology of good toric contact manifolds

In this paper we show that any good toric contact manifold has well defined cylindrical contact homology and describe how it can be combinatorially computed from the associated moment cone. As an application we compute the cylindrical contact homology of a particularly nice family of examples that appear in the work of Gauntlett-Martelli-Sparks-Waldram on Sasaki-Einstein metrics. We show in particular that these give rise to a new infinite family of non-equivalent contact structures on $S^2 \times S^{3}$ in the unique homotopy class of almost contact structures with vanishing first Chern class.Comment: 30 pages. Version 2: minor corrections, improved exposition and expanded subsection 6.2 (see Remark 1.5). Version 3: minor corrections, clarified assumptions in section 4, added references, to appear in Compositio Mathematic

Cascades and perturbed Morse-Bott functions

Let $f:M \rightarrow \mathbb{R}$ be a Morse-Bott function on a finite dimensional closed smooth manifold $M$. Choosing an appropriate Riemannian metric on $M$ and Morse-Smale functions $f_j:C_j \rightarrow \mathbb{R}$ on the critical submanifolds $C_j$, one can construct a Morse chain complex whose boundary operator is defined by counting cascades \cite{FraTheA}. Similar data, which also includes a parameter $\epsilon > 0$ that scales the Morse-Smale functions $f_j$, can be used to define an explicit perturbation of the Morse-Bott function $f$ to a Morse-Smale function $h_\epsilon:M \rightarrow \mathbb{R}$ \cite{AusMor} \cite{BanDyn}. In this paper we show that the Morse-Smale-Witten chain complex of $h_\epsilon$ is the same as the Morse chain complex defined using cascades for any $\epsilon >0$ sufficiently small. That is, the two chain complexes have the same generators, and their boundary operators are the same (up to a choice of sign). Thus, the Morse Homology Theorem implies that the homology of the cascade chain complex of $f:M \rightarrow \mathbb{R}$ is isomorphic to the singular homology $H_\ast(M;\mathbb{Z})$.Comment: 34 pages, 2 figure