Contact integral geometry and the Heisenberg algebra

Abstract

Generalizing Weyl’s tube formula and building on Chern’s work, Alesker reinterpreted the Lipschitz–Killing curvature integrals as a family of valuations (finitely additive measures with good analytic properties), attached canonically to any Riemannian manifold, which is universal with respect to isometric embeddings. We uncover a similar structure for contact manifolds. Namely, we show that a contact manifold admits a canonical family of generalized valuations, which are universal under contact embeddings. Those valuations assign numerical invariants to even-dimensional submanifolds, which in a certain sense measure the curvature at points of tangency to the contact structure. Moreover, these valuations generalize to the class of manifolds equipped with the structure of a Heisenberg algebra on their cotangent bundle. Pursuing the analogy with Euclidean integral geometry, we construct symplectic-invariant distributions on Grassmannians to produce Crofton formulas on the contact sphere. Using closely related distributions, we obtain Crofton formulas also in the linear symplectic space.