A SELF-LINKING FORMULA FOR CURVES IN THE HEISENBERG SPACE

The formula Lk = Wr + Tw, which expresses the linking number of two curves that bound a ribbon as a sum of two terms, has particularly interested biologists and was used to understand the DNA structure. The study of Legendrian curves in contact manifolds, and in particular in the Heisenberg space, is attached to some important problems in geometry, as the problem of classification of contact structures. In this work, we show the analogue formula for curves in the Heisenberg space, we relate the writhing number with the Thurston-Benequin invariant of a Legendrian curve and derive some results directly from this formula.