Slant Curves in 3-dimensional Normal Almost Contact Geometry

The aim of this paper is to study slant curves of three-dimensional normal almost contact manifolds as natural generalization of Legendre curves. Such a curve is characterized by means of the scalar product between its normal vector field and the Reeb vector field of the ambient space. In the particular case of a helix we show that it has a proper (non-harmonic) mean curvature vector field. The general expressions of the curvature and torsion of these curves and the associated Lancret invariant are computed as well as the corresponding variants for some particular cases, namely beta-Sasakian and cosymplectic. A class of examples is discussed for a normal not quasi-Sasakian 3-manifold.