Lines on contact manifolds II

Abstract

Complex contact manifolds have recently received considerable attention. Many of the newer publications approach contact manifolds via the covering family of minimal rational curves. This short note furthers the study of these curves. It is known that for any point x in X, the subvariety, which is covered by those curves which contain x, is Legendrian. We will now study the deformations of these subvarieties which are generated by moving the base point. As a main application, we give a positive answer to a question of J.M. Hwang in the case of contact manifolds: a sufficiently general tangent vector is contained in at most a single minimal rational curve. The author believes that this is a necessary step towards a full classification of contact manifolds. We give a second application by showing that the normalization of the subvariety of minimal curves through x is isomorphic to a projective cone.