We construct an enhanced version of knot contact homology, and show that we can deduce from it the group ring of the knot group together with the peripheral subgroup. In particular, it completely determines a knot up to smooth isotopy. The enhancement consists of the (fully noncommutative) Legendrian contact homology associated to the union of the conormal torus of the knot and a disjoint cotangent fiber sphere, along with a product on a filtered part of this homology. As a corollary, we obtain a new, holomorphiccurve proof of a result of the third author that the Legendrian isotopy class of the conormal torus is a complete knot invariant.

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We introduce symplectic Calabi–Yau caps to obtain new obstructions to exact fillings. In particular, they imply that any exact filling of the standard contact structure on the unit cotangent bundle of a hyperbolic surface has vanishing first Chern class and has the same integral homology and intersection form as its disk cotangent bundle. This gives evidence to a conjecture that all of its exact fillings are diffeomorphic to the disk cotangent bundle. As a result, we also obtain the first infinite family of Stein fillable contact 3-manifolds with uniform bounds on the Betti numbers of its exact fillings but admitting minimal strong fillings of arbitrarily large b2. Moreover, we introduce the notion of symplectic uniruled/adjunction caps and uniruled/ adjunction contact structures to present a unified picture to the existing finiteness results on the topological invariants of exact/strong fillings of a contact 3-manifold. As a byproduct, we find new classes of contact 3-manifolds with the finiteness properties and extend Wand’s obstruction of planar contact 3-manifolds to uniruled/adjunction contact structures with complexity zero.

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