Contact homology and higher dimensional closing lemmas

We develop methods for studying the smooth closing lemma for Reeb flows in any dimension using contact homology. As an application, we prove a conjecture of Irie, stating that the strong closing lemma holds for Reeb flows on ellipsoids. Our methods also apply to other Reeb flows, and we illustrate this for a class of examples introduced by Albers-Geiges-Zehmisch.