Let $\{\Lambda ^\infty _t\}$ be an isotopy of Legendrians (possibly singular) in a unit cosphere bundle $S^*M$ that arise as slices of a singular Legendrian $\Lambda _I^\infty \subset S^*M \times T^*I$. Let $\mathcal {C}_t = Sh(M, \Lambda ^\infty _t)$ be the differential graded derived category of constructible sheaves on $M$ with singular support at infinity contained in $\Lambda ^\infty _t$. We prove that if the isotopy of Legendrians embeds into an isotopy of Liouville hypersurfaces, then the family of categories $\{\mathcal {C}_t\}$ is constant in $t$.

In this paper, we introduce variants of formal nearby cycles for a locally noetherian formal scheme over a complete discrete valuation ring. If the formal scheme is locally algebraizable, then our nearby cycle gives a generalization of Berkovich’s formal nearby cycle. Our construction is entirely scheme theoretic, and does not require rigid geometry. Our theory is intended for applications to the local study of the cohomology of Rapoport–Zink spaces.

We show that for a polynomial map, the size of the Jordan blocks for the eigenvalue 1 of the monodromy at infinity is bounded by the multiplicity of the reduced divisor at infinity of a good compactification of a general fiber. The existence of such Jordan blocks is related to global invariant cycles of the graded pieces of the weight filtration. These imply some applications to period integrals. We also show that such a Jordan block of size greater than 1 for the graded pieces of the weight filtration is the restriction of a strictly larger Jordan block for the total cohomology group. If there are no singularities at infinity, we have a more precise statement on the monodromy.

We calculate l-adic nearby cycles in the étale cohomology for families with log smooth reduction using log étale cohomology. In particular, nearby cycles for log smooth families coincide with tame nearby cycles, as L. Illusie expected, and nearby cycles for semistable families depend only on the first infinitesimal neighborhood of the special fiber.