Let T  (Y, ) be a transverse knot which is the binding of some open book, (T, ), for the ambient contact manifold (Y, ). In this paper, we show that the transverse invariant bT(T ) 2[HFK(−Y,K), defined in [LOSSz09], is nonvanishing for such transverse knots. This is true regardless of whether or not  is tight. We also prove a vanishing theorem for the invariants L and T. As a corollary, we show that if (T, ) is an open book with connected binding, then the complement of T has no Giroux torsion.

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In this short note, we give a new proof of a theorem of Arezzo-Tian on the existence of smooth geodesic rays tamed by a special degeneration with smooth central fiber.

For a path in a compact finite dimensional Alexandrov space X with curv  , the two basic geometric invariants are the length and the turning angle (which measures the closeness from being a geodesic). We show that the sum of the two invariants of any loop is bounded from below in terms of , the dimension, diameter, and Hausdorff measure of X. This generalizes a basic estimate of Cheeger on the length of a closed geodesic in a closed Riemannian manifold ([Ch], [GP1,2]). To see that the above result also generalizes and improves an analog of the Cheeger type estimate in Alexandrov geometry in [BGP], we show that for a class of subsets of X, the n-dimensional Hausdorff measure and rough volume are proportional by a constant depending on n = dim(X).

We study Legendrian singularities arising in complex contact geometry. We define a one-parameter family of bases in the ring of Legendrian characteristic classes such that any Legendrian Thom polynomial has nonnegative coefficients when expanded in these bases. The method uses a suitable Lagrange Grassmann bundle on the product of projective spaces. This is an extension of a nonnegativity result for Lagrangian Thom polynomials obtained by the authors previously. For a fixed specialization, other special- izations of the parameter lead to upper bounds for the coefficients of the given basis. One gets also upper bounds of the coefficients from the positivity of classical Thom polynomials (of singularities of mappings), obtained previously by the last two authors.