Riemannian Curl in Contact Geometry

Abstract

We consider a contact manifold with a pseudo-Riemannian metric and define a contact vector field intrinsically associated to this pair of structures. We call this new differential invariant the contact Riemannian curl. On a Riemannian manifold, Killing vector fields are those that annihilate the metric; a Killing $1$-form is obtained from a Killing vector field by lowering indices. We show that the contact Riemannian curl vanishes if the metric is of constant curvature and the contact structure is defined by a Killing $1$-form. We also show that the contact Riemannian curl has a strong similarity with the Schwarzian derivative since it depends only on the projective equivalence class of the metric. For the Laplace-Beltrami operator on a contact manifold, the contact Riemannian curl is proportional to the subsymbol defined in arXiv:1205.6562. We also show that the contact Riemannian curl vanishes on the (co)tangent bundle over a Riemannian manifold. This implies that the corresponding subsymbol of the Laplace-Beltrami operator is identically zero.