For a proper geodesic metric space $X$, the Morse boundary $\partial_*X$ focuses on the hyperbolic-like directions in the space $X$. It is a quasi-isometry invariant. That is, a quasi-isometry between two hyperbolic spaces induces a homeomorphism on their boundaries. In this paper, we investigate additional structures on the Morse boundary $\partial_*X$ which determine $X$ up to a quasi-isometry. We prove that, for $X$ and $Y$ proper, cocompact spaces, a homeomorphism $f$ between their Morse boundaries is induced by a quasi-isometry if and only if $f$ and $f^{-1}$ are bihölder, or quasi-symmetric, or strongly quasi-conformal.
Let $X$ be a proper geodesic metric space and let $G$ be a group of isometries of $X$ which acts geometrically. Cordes constructed the Morse boundary of $X$ which generalizes the contracting boundary for CAT(0) spaces and the visual boundary for hyperbolic spaces. We characterize Morse elements in $G$ by their fixed points on the Morse boundary $\partial_MX$. The dynamics on the Morse boundary is very similar to that of a $δ$-hyperbolic space. In particular, we show that the action of $G$ on $\partial_MX$ is minimal if $G$ is not virtually cyclic. We also get a uniform convergence result on th…
The Morse boundary of a proper geodesic metric space is designed to encode hypberbolic-like behavior in the space. A key property of this boundary is that a quasi-isometry between two such spaces induces a homeomorphism on their Morse boundaries. In this paper we investigate when the converse holds. We prove that for cocompact CAT(0) spaces, a homeomorphism of Morse boundaries is induced by a quasi-isometry if and only if the homeomorphism is quasi-mobius and 2-stable.
We prove that the sublinearly Morse boundary of every known cubulated group continuously injects in the Gromov boundary of a certain hyperbolic graph. We also show that for all CAT(0) cube complexes, convergence to sublinearly Morse geodesic rays has a simple combinatorial description using the hyperplanes crossed by such sequences. As an application of this combinatorial description, we show that a certain subspace of the Roller boundary continously surjects on the subspace of the visual boundary consisting of sublinearly Morse geodesic rays.
Murasugi sums can be defined as readily for Morse maps to the circle of (arbitrary) link complements in the 3-sphere as for fibrations over the circle of (fibered) link complements in the 3-sphere. As one application, I show that if a knot K has free genus m, then there is a Morse map from its complement to the circle (representing the relative homology class of a Seifert surface for K) with no more than 4m critical points.
The Morse-Novikov number MN(L) of an oriented link L in the 3-sphere is the minimum number of critical points of a Morse map from the complement of L in the 3-sphere to the circle representing the class of a Seifert surface for L (e.g., the Morse-Novikov number of L is zero if and only if L is fibered). We develop various constructions of Morse maps (Milnor maps, Stallings twists, splicing along a link which is a closed braid with respect to a Morse map, Murasugi sums, cutting a Morse map along an arc on a page) and use them to bound Morse-Novikov numbers from above in terms of other knot and …
We show that the Morse boundary of a right-angled Coxeter group may contain embedded circles that do not arise as the boundary of a Morse Fuchsian subgroup visible in the defining graph.
Main subject of the paper is a (strong) Morse function on a compact manifold with boundary. We construct a cellular structure and discuss its algebraic properties in this paper. Also we get an estimation on Arnold's question on a number of critical points of a Morse function with given boundary condition.
Given a compact smooth manifold $M$ with non-empty boundary and a Morse function, a pseudo-gradient Morse-Smale vector field adapted to the boundary allows one to build a Morse complex whose homology is isomorphic to the (absolute or relative to the boundary) homology of $M$ with integer coefficients. Our approach simplifies other methods which have been discussed in more specific geometric settings.
The Morse boundary of a proper geodesic metric space is designed to encode hypberbolic-like behavior in the space. A key property of this boundary is that a quasi-isometry between two such spaces induces a homeomorphism on their Morse boundaries. In this paper we investigate when the converse holds. We prove that for $X, Y$ proper, cocompact spaces, a homeomorphism between their Morse boundaries is induced by a quasi-isometry if and only if the homeomorphism is quasi-mobius and 2-stable.
Let a finitely generated group $G$ split as a graph of groups. If edge groups are undistorted and do not contribute to the Morse boundary $\partial_MG$, we show that every connected component of $\partial_MG$ with at least two points originates from the Morse boundary of a vertex group. Under stronger assumptions on the edge groups (such as wideness in the sense of Druţu-Sapir), we show that Morse boundaries of vertex groups are topologically embedded in $\partial_MG$.
We show that the sublinearly Morse boundary of a CAT(0) cubical group with a factor system is well-defined up to homeomorphism with respect to the visual topology. The key tool used in the proof is a new topology on sublinearly Morse boundaries that is induced by group actions on hyperbolic spaces that are sufficiently nice, for example, largest acylindrical actions. Using the same techniques, we obtain a explicit description of this new topology on the sublinearly Morse boundary of any hierarchically hyperbolic group in terms of medians. Finally, we explicitly describe the sublinear Morse bou…
We generalize a result of Paulin on the Gromov boundary of hyperbolic groups to the Morse boundary of proper, maximal hierarchically hyperbolic spaces admitting cocompact group actions by isometries. Namely we show that if the Morse boundaries of two such spaces each contain at least three points, then the spaces are quasi-isometric if and only if there exists a 2-stable, quasi-möbius homeomorphism between their Morse boundaries. Our result extends a recent result of Charney-Murray, who prove such a classification for CAT(0) groups, and is new for mapping class groups and the fundamental group…
To every Gromov hyperbolic space X one can associate a space at infinity called the Gromov boundary of X. Gromov showed that quasi-isometries of hyperbolic metric spaces induce homeomorphisms on their boundaries, thus giving rise to a well-defined notion of the boundary of a hyperbolic group. Croke and Kleiner showed that the visual boundary of non-positively curved (CAT(0)) groups is not well-defined, since quasi-isometric CAT(0) spaces can have non-homeomorphic boundaries. For any sublinear function $κ$, we consider a subset of the visual boundary called the $κ$-Morse boundary and show that …
In studies of smooth maps with good differential topological conditions such as immersions, embeddings, Morse functions and their higher dimensional versions including fold maps and application to geometry, especially algebraic and differential topology of manifolds, liftings or desingulizations of maps of appropriate classes to other maps of other appropriate classes are fundamental and important. In this paper, we consider Morse functions such that inverse images of regular values are disjoint unions of spheres, which are extensions of Morse functions with just two singular points on homotop…
Given a compact manifold with a non-empty boundary and equipped with a generic Morse function (that is, no critical point on the boundary and the restriction to the boundary is a Morse function), we already knew how to construct two Morse complexes, one yielding the absolute homology and the other the relative homology. In this note, we construct a short exact sequence from both of them and the Morse complex of the boundary. Moreover, we define a pairing of the relative Morse complex with the absolute Morse complex which induces the intersection product in homology, in the form due to S. Lefsc…
We develop Morse theory for manifolds with boundary. Besides standard and expected facts like the handle cancellation theorem and the Morse lemma for manifolds with boundary, we prove that, under a topological assumption, a critical point in the interior of a Morse function can be moved to the boundary, where it splits into a pair of boundary critical points. As an application, we prove that every cobordism of manifolds with boundary splits as a union of left product cobordisms and right product cobordisms.
The paper is devoted to the study of topological properties, structure and classification of Morse flows with fixed points on the boundary of three-dimensional manifolds. We construct a complete topological invariant of a Morse flow, Pr-diagram, which is similar to the Heegaard diagram of a closed 3-manifold.
We discuss generic smooth maps from smooth manifolds to smooth surfaces, which we call "Morse 2-functions", and homotopies between such maps. The two central issues are to keep the fibers connected, in which case the Morse 2-function is "fiber-connected", and to avoid local extrema over 1-dimensional submanifolds of the range, in which case the Morse 2-function is "indefinite". This is foundational work for the long-range goal of defining smooth invariants from Morse 2-functions using tools analogous to classical Morse homology and Cerf theory.
We prove several combinatorial results on path algebras over discrete structures related to directed graphs. These results are motivated by Morse theory on a manifold with boundary and, more generally, by Floer theory on a configuration space with boundary. Their purpose is to organize cobordism relationships among moduli spaces in order to define new algebraic invariants. We discuss applications to the Morse and Fukaya categories, and to work with John Baldwin on a bordered monopole Floer theory.
In the first part of this paper, we consider smooth maps from a compact orientable 3-manifold without boundary to the 2-sphere. We give a geometric criterion to decide whether two given maps are homotopic, based on the sets of points where the maps are equal or antipodal. We extend this criterion to non-singular vector fields (and co-oriented plane fields) on 3-manifolds. In the second part, we make use of this criterion to study non-singular Morse-Smale vector fields on Seifert manifolds, giving a simple proof of a result of Yano.
Stable subgroups and the Morse boundary are two systematic approaches to collect and study the hyperbolic aspects of finitely generated groups. In this paper we unify and generalize these strategies by viewing any geodesic metric space as a countable union of stable subspaces: we show that every stable subgroup is a quasi--convex subset of a set in this collection and that the Morse boundary is recovered as the direct limit of the usual Gromov boundaries of these hyperbolic subspaces. We use this approach, together with results of Leininger--Schleimer, to deduce that there is no purely geometr…
By a Morse function on a compact manifold with boundary we mean a real-valued function without critical points near the boundary such that its critical points as well as the critical points of its restriction to the boundary are all non-degenerate. For such Morse functions, Saeki and Yamamoto have previously defined a certain notion of cusp cobordism, and computed the unoriented cusp cobordism group of Morse functions on surfaces. In this paper, we compute unoriented and oriented cusp cobordism groups of Morse functions on manifolds of any dimension by employing Levine's cusp elimination techn…
Let G be a compact Lie group and A(G) its Burnside Ring. For a compact smooth n-dimensional G-manifold X equipped with a generic G-invariant vector field v, we prove an equivariant analog of the Morse formula Ind^G(v) = \sum_{k = 0}^{n} (-1)^k χ^G(\d_k^+X) which takes its values in A(G). Here Ind^G(v) denotes the equivariant index of the field v, {\d_k^+X\} the v-induced Morse stratification (see [M]) of the boundary \d X, and χ^G(\d_k^+X) the class of the (n - k)-manifold \d_k^+X in $A(G)$. We examine some applications of this formula to the equivariant real algebraic fields v in compact doma…
For any smooth Riemannian metric on an $(n+1)$-dimensional compact manifold with boundary $(M,\partial M)$ where $3\leq (n+1)\leq 7$, we establish general upper bounds for the Morse index of free boundary minimal hypersurfaces produced by min-max theory in the Almgren-Pitts setting. We apply our Morse index estimates to prove that for almost every (in the $C^\infty$ Baire sense) Riemannan metric, the union of all compact, properly embedded free boundary minimal hypersurfaces is dense in $M$. If $\partial M$ is further assumed to have a strictly mean convex point, we show the existence of infin…
In this paper, we study Vanishing Mean Oscillation vector fields on a compact manifold with boundary. Inspired by the work of Brezis and Niremberg, we construct a topological invariant - the index - for such fields, and establish the analogue of Morse's formula. As a consequence, we characterize the set of boundary data which can be extended to nowhere vanishing VMO vector fields. Finally, we show briefly how these ideas can be applied to (unoriented) line fields with VMO regularity, thus providing a reasonable framework for modelling a surface coated with a thin film of nematic liquid crystal…
The contracting boundary of a proper geodesic metric space generalizes the Gromov boundary of a hyperbolic space. It consists of contracting geodesics up to bounded Hausdorff distances. Another generalization of the Gromov boundary is the $κ$-Morse boundary with a sublinear function $κ$. The two generalizations model the Gromov boundary based on different characteristics of geodesics in Gromov hyperbolic spaces. It was suspected that the $κ$-Morse boundary contains the contracting boundary. We will prove this conjecture: when $κ=1$ is the constant function, the 1-Morse boundary and the contrac…
Let $M$ be a smooth connected orientable compact surface. Denote by $F(M,S^1)$ the space of all Morse functions $f:M\to S^1$ having no critical points on the boundary of $M$ and such that for every boundary component $V$ of $M$ the restriction $f|_{V}:V\to S^1$ is either a constant map or a covering map. Endow $F(M,S^1)$ with the $C^{\infty}$-topology. In this note the connected components of $F(M,S^1)$ are classified. This result extends the results of S. V. Matveev, V. V. Sharko, and the author for the case of Morse functions being locally constant on the boundary of $M$.
We prove that an embedded cobordism between manifolds with boundary can be split into a sequence of right product and left product cobordisms, if the codimension of the embedding is at least two. This is a topological counterpart of the algebraic splitting theorem for embedded cobordisms of the first author, A. Nemethi and A. Ranicki. In the codimension one case, we provide a slightly weaker statement. We also give proofs of rearrangement and cancellation theorems for handles of embedded submanifolds with boundary.
In various situations in Floer theory, one extracts homological invariants from "Morse-Bott" data in which the "critical set" is a union of manifolds, and the moduli spaces of "flow lines" have evaluation maps taking values in the critical set. This requires a mix of analytic arguments (establishing properties of the moduli spaces and evaluation maps) and formal arguments (defining or computing invariants from the analytic data). The goal of this paper is to isolate the formal arguments, in the case when the critical set is a union of circles. Namely, we state axioms for moduli spaces and eval…
Let $M$ be a compact surface and $P$ be a one dimensional manifold without boundary, that is the line $\mathbb{R}^1$ or a circle $S^1$. The classification of path-components of the space of Morse maps from $M$ into $P$ was recently obtained by S. V. Matveev and V. V. Sharko for the case $P=\mathbb{R}$. For $P=S^1$ the classification was obtained by the author. All this results can be reformulated as one theorem: "Two Morse maps $f,g:M \to P$ belong to the same path component of a space of Morse mappings from $M$ into $P$ if and only if they are homotopic and have the same number of crutucal po…
Random walks on spaces with hyperbolic properties tend to sublinearly track geodesic rays which point in certain hyperbolic-like directions. Qing-Rafi-Tiozzo recently introduced the sublinearly Morse boundary and proved that this boundary is a quasi-isometry invariant which captures a notion of generic direction in a broad context. In this article, we develop the geometric foundations of sublinear Morseness in the mapping class group and Teichmüller space. We prove that their sublinearly Morse boundaries are visibility spaces and admit continuous equivariant injections into the boundary of the…
The first author in recent work with D. Gay developed the notion of a Morse structure on an open book as a tool for studying closed contact 3-manifolds. We extend the notion of Morse structure to extendable partial open books in order to study contact 3-manifolds with convex boundary.
Let $L\subset J^1(M)$ be a Legendrian submanifold of the 1-jet space of a Riemannian $n$-manifold $M$. A correspondence is established between rigid flow trees in $M$ determined by $L$ and boundary punctured rigid pseudo-holomorphic disks in $T^\ast M$, with boundary on the projection of $L$ and asymptotic to the double points of this projection at punctures, provided $n\le 2$, or provided $n>2$ and the front of $L$ has only cusp edge singularities. This result, in particular, shows how to compute the Legendrian contact homology of $L$ in terms of Morse theory.
We give elementary constructions of manifold with corner structures and associative gluing maps on compactifications of spaces of infinite, half infinite, and finite Morse flow lines.
A Reeb space is defined as the space of all the connected components of inverse images of a smooth map, which is a fundamental tool in studying smooth manifolds using generic smooth maps whose codimensions are not positive such as Morse functions, their higher dimensional versions including fold maps and general stable maps. A special generic map is a fold map and a generalization of Morse functions with just 2 singular points on homotopy spheres and the Reeb space is a compact manifold whose dimension is equal to that of the target manifold and which can be immersed into the target manifold. …
By studying spaces of flow graphs in a closed oriented manifold, we construct operations on its cohomology, parametrized by the homology of the moduli spaces of compact Riemann surfaces with boundary marked points. We show that the operations satisfy the gluing axiom of an open homological conformal field theory. This complements previous constructions due to R. Cohen et al., K. Costello and M. Kontsevich and is also the Morse theoretic counterpart to a conjectural construction of operations on the Lagrangian Floer homology of the zero section of a cotangent bundle, obtained by studying uncomp…
We extend the Novikov Morse-type inequalities for closed 1-forms in 2 directions. First, we consider manifolds with boundary. Second, we allow a very degenerate structure of the critical set of the form, assuming only that the form is non-degenerated in the sense of Kirwan. In particular, we obtain a generalization of a result of Floer about the usual Morse inequalities on a manifold with boundary. We also obtain an equivariant version of our inequalities. Our proof is based on an application of the Witten deformation technique. The main novelty here is that we consider the neighborhood of the…
