On the contact mapping class group of the contactization of the $A_m$- Milnor fiber

Abstract: We construct an embedding of the full braid group on $m+1$ strands $B_{m+1}$, $m \geq 1$, into the contact mapping class group of the contactization $Q \times S^1$ of the $A_m$-Milnor fiber $Q$. The construction uses the embedding of $B_{m+1}$ into the symplectic mapping class group of $Q$ due to Khovanov and Seidel, and a natural lifting homomorphism. In order to show that the composed homomorphism is still injective, we use a partially linearized variant of the Chekanov--Eliashberg dga for Legendrians which lie above one another in $Q \times \mathbb{R}$, reducing the proof to Floer homology. As corollaries we obtain a contribution to the contact isotopy problem for $Q \times S^1$, as well as the fact that in dimension $4$, the lifting homomorphism embeds the symplectic mapping class group of $Q$ into the contact mapping class group of $Q \times S^1$.