JOURNAL OF THE AUSTRALIAN MATHEMATICAL SOCIETY SERIES A-PURE MATHEMATICS AND STATISTICS, vol.70, pp.351-385, 2001 (SCI-Expanded)
In this paper we construct a family of variational families for a Legendrian embedding, into the 1-jet bundle of a closed manifold, that can be obtained from the zero section through Legendrian embeddings, by discretising the action functional. We compute the second variation of a generating function obtained as above at a nondegenerate critical point and prove a formula relating the signature of the second variation to the Maslov index as the mesh goes to zero. We use this to prove a generalisation of the Morse inequalities thus refining a theorem of Chekanov.