On the Construction of Contact Submanifolds with Prescribed Topology

Abstract

We prove the existence of contact submanifolds realizing the Poincaré dual of the top Chern class of a complex vector bundle over a closed contact manifold. This result is analogue in the contact category to Donaldson's construction of symplectic submanifolds. The main tool in the construction is to show the existence of sequences of sections which are asymptotically holomorphic in an appropiate sense and that satisfy a transversality with estimates property directly in the contact category. The description of the obtained contact submanifolds allows us to prove an extension of the Lefschetz hyperplane theorem which completes their topological characterization.