Joint IAS/Princeton University Symplectic Geometry Seminar

The contact connected sum is a well-understood operation for contact manifolds. I will focus on the 3-dimensional case and the Weinstein 1-handle model for the contact connected sum. I will discuss how pseudo-holomorphic curves in the symplectization behave under this operation. After reviewing embedded contact homology, we will see how this results in a chain-level description of the embedded contact homology of a connected sum.