Appears in collection : John Pardon - Contact homology and virtual fundamental cycles

The goal of this course is to give a construction of contact homology in the sense of Eliashberg--Givental--Hofer. I will begin with an introduction to contact geometry, pseudo-holomorphic curves as introduced by Gromov, and some target applications of contact homology. The main focus will then be on extracting enough enumerative information (i.e. "virtual fundamental cycles") out of the relevant moduli spaces of pseudo-holomorphic curves. I will present a general framework for doing this, and then discuss the specific application to contact homology.