EN
An elementary stabilization of a Legendrian knot L in the spherical cotangent bundle ST*M of a surface M is a surgery that results in attaching a handle to M along two discs away from the image in M of the projection of the knot L. A virtual Legendrian isotopy is a composition of stabilizations, destabilizations and Legendrian isotopies. A class of virtual Legendrian isotopy is called a virtual Legendrian knot.
In contrast to Legendrian knots, virtual Legendrian knots enjoy the property that there is a bijective correspondence between the virtual Legendrian knots and the equivalence classes of Gauss diagrams.
We study virtual Legendrian knots and show that every such class contains a unique irreducible representative. In particular we get a solution to the following conjecture of Cahn, Levi and the first author: two Legendrian knots in ST*S² that are isotopic as virtual Legendrian knots must be Legendrian isotopic in ST*S².