Monodromic Perverse Sheaves on Shifted Contact Stacks

Source abstract

Applying the BBDJS minimal model to the derived symplectification of a $-1$-shifted contact derived Artin stack and descending algebraically along the structural free $\mathbb{G}_m$-action, we construct an $\ell$-adic perverse sheaf on any oriented such stack, and use Verdier's specialization equivalence for monodromic sheaves to equip it with a tame twisted monodromy operator $θ$. We show that the local fundamental class of a Legendrian $L$ satisfies $θ\circ μ_L = (-1)^{\mathrm{vdim} L}μ_L$, so that on Legendrians of odd virtual dimension, the class vanishes due to $θ$-invariance. Moreover, both parities occur already on the $A_1$ chart while an odd Legendrian can carry a nonzero local class. We further formulate a contact analogue of Joyce's conjecture for a graded orientation, in which the orientation datum is twisted by the parity of the virtual dimension. Under the assumption of a monodromic refinement of the symplectic conjecture, we construct the categorified Legendrian 2-categories $\mathfrak{L}\mathcal{F}_c(X)$ and $LLeg_0$ via $\ell$-adic pull-push functors. Finally, we show that the contact Behrend function is identically $1$, so that the associated Donaldson-Thomas invariant is the compactly supported étale Euler characteristic of the classical truncation, and that the higher traces of $θ$ recover the singularity type that the first trace discards. As an application, we show that the symplectic invariant of a derived intersection of conic Lagrangians in a cotangent bundle vanishes identically, while the contact invariant computes the Euler characteristic of the projectivized intersection, with an explicit formula for conormal bundles.