A Note on the First Integrals of Vector Fields with Integrating Factors and Normalizers

We prove a sufficient condition for the existence of explicit first integrals for vector fields which admit an integrating factor. This theorem recovers and extends previous results in the literature on the integrability of vector fields which are volume preserving and possess nontrivial normalizers. Our approach is geometric and coordinate-free and hence it works on any smooth orientable manifold

Contact structures and Beltrami fields on the torus and the sphere

We present new explicit tight and overtwisted contact structures on the (round) 3-sphere and the (flat) 3-torus for which the ambient metric is weakly compatible. Our proofs are based on the construction of nonvanishing curl eigenfields using suitable families of Jacobi or trigonometric polynomials. As a consequence, we show that the contact sphere theorem of Etnyre, Komendarczyk and Massot (2012) does not hold for weakly compatible metric as it was conjectured. We also establish a geometric rigidity for tight contact structures by showing that any contact form on the 3-sphere admitting a compatible metric that is the round one is isometric, up to a constant factor, to the standard (tight) contact form.Comment: 19 pages; version accepted for publication (Indiana University Mathematics Journal