The 2011 PhD thesis of Farris demonstrated that the ECH of a prequantization bundle over a Riemann surface is isomorphic as a Z/2Z-graded group to the exterior algebra of the homology of its base. We extend this result by computing the Z-grading on the chain complex, permitting a finer understanding of this isomorphism and a stability result for ECH. We fill in a number of technical details, including the Morse-Bott direct limit argument and the classification of certain J-holomorphic buildings. The former requires the isomorphism between filtered Seiberg-Witten Floer cohomology and filtered ECH as established by Hutchings-Taubes. The latter requires the work on higher asymptotics of pseudoholomorphic curves by Cristofaro-Gardiner--Hutchings--Zhang to obtain the writhe bounds necessary to appeal to an intersection theory argument of Hutchings-Nelson.
Using the framework of quasi-Hamiltonian actions, we compute the obstruction to prequantization for the moduli space of flat ${\rm PU}(p)$-bundles over a compact orientable surface with prescribed holonomies around boundary components, where $p>2$ is prime.
We study Reeb dynamics on prequantization circle bundles and the filtered (equivariant) symplectic homology of prequantization line bundles, aka negative line bundles, with symplectically aspherical base. We define (equivariant) symplectic capacities, obtain an upper bound on their growth, prove uniform instability of the filtered symplectic homology and touch upon the question of stable displacement. We also introduce a new algebraic structure on the positive (equivariant) symplectic homology capturing the free homotopy class of a closed Reeb orbit -- the linking number filtration -- and use …
We prove a version of Sandon's conjecture on the number of translated points of contactomorphisms for the case of prequantization bundles over certain closed monotone symplectic toric manifolds. Namely we show that any contactomorphism of such a prequantization bundle lying in the identity component of the contactomorphism group possesses at least $N$ translated points, where $N$ is the minimal Chern number of the symplectic toric manifold. The proof relies on the theory of generating functions coupled with equivariant cohomology, whereby we adapt Givental's approach to the Arnold conjecture f…
In this paper, we prove that every graphical hypersurface in a prequantization bundle over a symplectic manifold $M$, pinched between two circle bundles whose ratio of radii is less than $\sqrt{2}$ carries either one short simple periodic orbit or carries at least $\operatorname{cuplength}(M)+1$ simple periodic Reeb orbits.
In the classical Kostant-Souriau prequantization procedure, the Poisson algebra of a symplectic manifold $(M,ω)$ is realized as the space of infinitesimal quantomorphisms of the prequantization circle bundle. Robinson and Rawnsley developed an alternative to the Kostant-Souriau quantization process in which the prequantization circle bundle and metaplectic structure for $(M,ω)$ are replaced by a metaplectic-c prequantization. They proved that metaplectic-c quantization can be applied to a larger class of manifolds than the classical recipe. This paper presents a definition for a metaplectic-c …
We establish multiplicity results for geometrically distinct contractible closed Reeb orbits of non-degenerate contact forms on a broad class of prequantization bundles. The results hold under certain index requirements on the contact form and are sharp for unit cotangent bundles of CROSS's. In particular, we generalize and put in the symplectic-topological context a theorem of Duan, Liu, Long, and Wang for the standard contact sphere. We also prove similar results for non-hyperbolic contractible closed orbits and briefly touch upon the multiplicity problem for degenerate forms. On the combina…
Hitchin has shown that the moduli space ${\mathcal M}$ of the dimensionally reduced self-dual Yang-Mills equations has a hyperKähler structure. In this paper we first explicitly show the hyperKähler structure, the details of which is missing in Hitchin's paper. We show here that ${\mathcal M}$ admits three pre-quantum line bundles, corresponding to the three symplectic forms. We use Quillen's determinant line bundle construction and show that the Quillen curvatures of these prequantum line bundles are proportional to each of the symplectic forms mentioned above. The prequantum line bundles are…
We study the existence of multiple closed Reeb orbits on some contact manifolds by means of $S^1$-equivariant symplectic homology and the index iteration formula. It is proved that a certain class of contact manifolds which admit displaceable exact contact embeddings, a certain class of prequantization bundles, and Brieskorn spheres have multiple closed Reeb orbits.
We investigate leaf-wise intersection points on hypersurfaces of contact type in monotone symplectic manifolds. We show that monotone Floer-essential Lagrangians detect periodic leaf-wise intersection points in hypersurfaces of contact type whose Reeb flow is Zoll. Examples include the prequantization bundles appearing in monotone toric negative line bundles. Generalizing, we prove the existence of leaf-wise intersection points for certain annulus subbundles in weak+-monotone negative line bundles, not necessarily toric. The proofs combine reduced symplectic cohomology with the original method…
In this paper, we compute the embedded contact homology (ECH) capacities of the disk cotangent bundles $D^*S^2$ and $D^*\mathbb{R} P^2$. We also find sharp symplectic embeddings into these domains. In particular, we compute their Gromov widths. In order to do that, we explicitly calculate the ECH chain complexes of $S^*S^2$ and $S^* \mathbb{R} P^2$ using a direct limit argument on the action inspired by Bourgeois's Morse-Bott approach and ideas from Nelson-Weiler's work on the ECH of prequantization bundles. Moreover, we use integrable systems techniques to find explicit symplectic embeddings.…
We fix an orientation issue which appears in our previous paper about the isomorphism between Floer homology of cotangent bundles and loop space homology. When the second Stiefel-Whitney class of the underlying manifold does not vanish on 2-tori, this isomorphism requires the use of a twisted version of the Floer complex.
We define partial quasi-morphisms on the group of Hamiltonian diffeomorphisms of the cotangent bundle using the spectral invariants in Lagrangian Floer homology with conormal boundary conditions, where the product compatible with the PSS isomorphism and the homological intersection product is lacking.
This paper is the sequel to the previous paper [Ne15], which showed that sufficient regularity exists to define cylindrical contact homology in dimension three for nondegenerate dynamically separated contact forms, a subclass of dynamically convex contact forms. The Reeb orbits of these so-called dynamically separated contact forms satisfy a uniform growth condition on their Conley-Zehnder indices with respect to a free homotopy class; see Definition 1.7. {Given a contact form which is dynamically separated up to large action, we demonstrate a filtration by action on the chain complex and show…
We study Liouville fillable contact manifolds $(Σ,ξ)$ with non-zero Rabinowitz Floer homology and assign spectral numbers to paths of contactomorphisms. As a consequence we prove that $\widetilde{\mathrm{Cont}_0}(Σ,ξ)$ is orderable in the sense of Eliashberg and Polterovich. This provides a new class of orderable contact manifolds. If the contact manifold is in addition periodic or a prequantization space $M \times S^1$ for $M$ a Liouville manifold, then we construct a contact capacity. This can be used to prove a general non-squeezing result, which amongst other examples in particular recover…
Let $V$ be a bounded domain with smooth boundary in $\R^n$, and $D^*V$ denote its disc cotangent bundle. We compute symplectic homology of $D^*V$, in terms of relative homology of loop spaces on the closure of $V$. We use this result to show that Floer-Hofer capacity of $D^*V$ is between $2r(V)$ and $2(n+1)r(V)$, where $r(V)$ denotes inradius of $V$. As an application, we study periodic billiard trajectories on $V$.
We describe how the result in [1] extends to prove the existence of a Serre type spectral sequence converging to the symplectic homology SH_*(M) of an exact Sub-Liouville domain M in a cotangent bundle T*N. We will define a notion of a fiber-wise symplectic homology SH_*(M,q) for each point q in N, which will define a graded local coefficient system on N. The spectral sequence will then have page two isomorphic to the homology of N with coefficients in this graded local system.
We prove that the pair-of-pants product on the Floer homology of the cotangent bundle of a compact manifold M corresponds to the Chas-Sullivan loop product on the singular homology of the loop space of M. We also prove related results concerning the Floer homological interpretation of the Pontrjagin product and of the Serre fibration. The techniques include a Fredholm theory for Cauchy-Riemann operators with jumping Lagrangian boundary conditions of conormal type, and a new cobordism argument replacing the standard gluing technique.
Consider the cotangent bundle of a closed Riemannian manifold and an almost complex structure close to the one induced by the Riemannian metric. For Hamiltonians which grow for instance quadratically in the fibers outside of a compact set, one can define Floer homology and show that it is naturally isomorphic to singular homology of the free loop space. We review the three isomorphisms constructed by Viterbo (1996), Salamon-Weber (2003) and Abbondandolo-Schwarz (2004). The theory is illustrated by calculating Morse and Floer homology in case of the euclidean n-torus. Applications include exist…
We study the following rigidity problem in symplectic geometry:can one displace a Lagrangian submanifold from a hypersurface? We relate this to the Arnold Chord Conjecture, and introduce a refined question about the existence of relative leaf-wise intersection points, which are the Lagrangian-theoretic analogue of the notion of leaf-wise intersection points defined by Moser. Our tool is Lagrangian Rabinowitz Floer homology, which we define first for Liouville domains and exact Lagrangian submanifolds with Legendrian boundary. We then extend this to the `virtually contact' setting. By means of …
We give a construction of Piunikhin--Salamon--Schwarz isomorphism between the Morse homology and the Floer homology generated by Hamiltonian orbits starting at the zero section and ending at the conormal bundle. We also prove that this isomorphism is natural in the sense that it commutes with the isomorphisms between the Morse homology for different choices of the Morse function and the Floer homology for different choices of the Hamiltonian. We define a product on the Floer homology and prove triangle inequality for conormal spectral invariants with respect to this product.
Consider the cotangent bundle of a Riemannian manifold $(M,g)$ of dimension 2 or more, endowed with a twisted symplectic structure defined by a closed weakly exact 2-form $σ$ on $M$ whose lift to the universal cover of $M$ admits a bounded primitive. We compute the Rabinowitz Floer homology of energy hypersurfaces $Σ_{k}=H^{-1}(k)$ of mechanical (kinetic energy + potential) Hamiltonians $H$ for the case when the energy value k is greater than the Mane critical value c. Under the stronger condition that k>c_{0}, where c_{0} denotes the strict Mane critical value, Abbondandolo and Schwarz recent…
In this article we prove existence of Reeb orbits for Bohr-Sommerfeld Legendrians in certain pre-quantization spaces. We give a quantitative estimate from below. These estimates are obtained by studying Floer homology for fibre-wise quadratic Hamiltonian functions on negative line bundles.
In this paper, we compute contact homology of some quasi-regular contact structures, which admit Hamiltonian actions of Reeb type of Lie groups. We will discuss the toric contact case, (where the torus is of Reeb type), and the case of homogeneous contact manifolds. In both of these cases the quotients by the Reeb action are Kähler and admit perfect Morse-Bott functions via the moment map. It turns out that the contact homology depends only on the homology of the symplectic base and the bundle data of the contact manifolds as a circle bundle over the base. Moreover we can identify the relevant…
We summarize recent work on a combinatorial knot invariant called knot contact homology. We also discuss the origins of this invariant in symplectic topology, via holomorphic curves and a conormal bundle naturally associated to the knot.
This paper concerns Floer homology for periodic orbits and for a Lagrangian intersection problem on the cotangent bundle of a compact orientable manifold M. The first result is a new uniform estimate for the solutions of the Floer equation, which allows to deal with a larger - and more natural - class of Hamiltonians. The second and main result is a new construction of the isomorphism between the Floer homology and the singular homology of the free loop space of M, in the periodic case, or of the based loop space of M, in the Lagrangian intersection problem. The idea for the construction of su…
In this paper we construct the Floer homology for an action functional which was introduced by Rabinowitz and prove a vanishing theorem. As an application, we show that there are no displaceable exact contact embeddings of the unit cotangent bundle of a sphere of dimension greater than three into a convex exact symplectic manifold with vanishing first Chern class. This generalizes Gromov's result that there are no exact Lagrangian embeddings of a sphere into a complex vector space.
For every nontrivial free homotopy class $α$ of loops in every closed connected Riemannian manifold $M$, we prove existence of a noncontractible 1-periodic orbit, for every compactly supported time-dependent Hamiltonian on the open unit cotangent bundle which is sufficiently large over the zero section. The proof shows that the Biran-Polterovich-Salamon capacity is finite for every closed connected Riemannian manifold and every free homotopy class of loops. This implies a dense existence theorem for periodic orbits on level hypersurfaces and, consequently, a refined version of the Weinstein co…
We study the topology of exact and Stein fillings of the canonical contact structure on the unit cotangent bundle of a closed surface $Σ_g$, where $g$ is at least 2. In particular, we prove a uniqueness theorem asserting that any Stein filling must be s-cobordant rel boundary to the disk cotangent bundle of $Σ_g$. For exact fillings, we show that the rational homology agrees with that of the disk cotangent bundle, and that the integral homology takes on finitely many possible values: for example, if $g-1$ is square-free, then any exact filling has the same integral homology and intersection fo…
We describe polar homology groups for complex manifolds. The polar k-chains are subvarieties of complex dimension k with meromorphic forms on them, while the boundary operator is defined by taking the polar divisor and the Poincare residue on it. The polar homology groups may be regarded as holomorphic analogues of the homology groups in topology. We also describe the polar homology groups for quasi-projective one-dimensional varieties (affine curves). These groups obey the Mayer--Vietoris property. A complex counterpart of the Gauss linking number of two curves in a three-fold and various gau…
We show that if K: P \to R is an autonomous Hamiltonian on a symplectic manifold (P,Ω) which attains 0 as a Morse-Bott nondegenerate minimum along a symplectic submanifold M, and if c_1(TP)|_M vanishes in real cohomology, then the Hamiltonian flow of K has contractible periodic orbits with bounded period on all sufficiently small energy levels. As a special case, if the geodesic flow on the cotangent bundle of M is twisted by a symplectic magnetic field form, then the resulting flow has contractible periodic orbits on all low energy levels. These results were proven by Ginzburg and Gürel when …
We will show that the cotangent bundle of a manifold whose free loopspace homology grows exponentially is not symplectomorphic to any smooth affine variety. We will also show that the unit cotangent bundle of such a manifold is not Stein fillable by a Stein domain whose completion is symplectomorphic to a smooth affine variety. For instance, these results hold for end connect sums of simply connected manifolds whose cohomology with coefficients in some field has at least two generators. We use an invariant called the growth rate of symplectic homology to prove this result.
We prove that if M is a closed, connected, oriented, rationally inessential manifold, then the Hofer-Zehnder capacity of the unit disk bundle of the cotangent bundle of M is finite.
We compute the Heegaard Floer homology of any rational homology 3-sphere with an open book decomposition of the form (T,ϕ), where T is a genus one surface with one boundary component. In addition, we compute the Heegaard Floer homology of any T^2-bundle over S^1 with first Betti number equal to one, and we compare our results with those of Lebow on the embedded contact homology of such torus bundles. We use these computations to place restrictions on Stein-filllings of the contact structures compatible with such open books, to narrow down somewhat the class of 3-braid knots with finite concord…
In this paper we establish the existence of periodic orbits belonging to any $σ$-atoroidal free homotopy class for Hamiltonian systems in the twisted disc bundle, provided that the compactly supported time-dependent Hamiltonian function is sufficiently large over the zero section and the magnitude of the weakly exact $2$-form $σ$ admitting a primitive with at most linear growth on the universal cover is sufficiently small. The proof relies on showing the invariance of Floer homology under symplectic deformations and on the computation of Floer homology for the cotangent bundle endowed with its…
We study the heat flow in the loop space of a closed Riemannian manifold $M$ as an adiabatic limit of the Floer equations in the cotangent bundle. Our main application is a proof that the Floer homology of the cotangent bundle, for the Hamiltonian function kinetic plus potential energy, is naturally isomorphic to the homology of the loop space.
We give a construction of the Floer homology of the pair of {\it non-compact} Lagrangian submanifolds, which satisfies natural continuity property under the Hamiltonian isotopy which moves the infinity but leaves the intersection set of the pair compact. This construction uses the concept of Lagrangian cobordism and certain singular Lagrangian submanifolds. We apply this construction to conormal bundles (or varieties) in the cotangent bundle, and relate it to a conjecture made by MacPherson on the intersection theory of the characteristic Lagrangian cycles associated to the perverse sheaves co…
In this paper, we prove homological stability of symplectomorphisms and extended hamiltonians of surfaces made discrete. We construct an isomorphism from the stable homology group of symplectomorphisms and extended Hamiltonians of surfaces to the homology of certain infinite loop spaces. We use these infinite loop spaces to study characteristic classes of surface bundles whose holonomy groups are area preserving, in particular we give a homotopy theoretic proof of the Kotschick-Morita theorem.
A classical way to construct a Lagrangian in a symplectic manifold $Σ$ is to let $Σ$ appear as a smooth fiber in a Lefschetz fibration. If this is possible the singularities of the fibration induce Lagrangian spheres in $Σ$ and these spheres, in turn, are representatives of the corresponding vanishing cycles in the homology of $Σ$. In this paper our aim is twofold: The first is to describe a generalization of the above mentioned construction to the "Morse-Bott" case. This leads, whenever such a degeneration exists, to the existence of Lagrangian sphere bundles rather than just spheres. In the …
We prove that every non-degenerate Reeb flow on a closed contact manifold $M$ admitting a strong symplectic filling $W$ with vanishing first Chern class carries at least two geometrically distinct closed orbits provided that the positive equivariant symplectic homology of $W$ satisfies a mild condition. Under further assumptions, we establish the existence of two geometrically distinct closed orbits on any contact finite quotient of $M$. Several examples of such contact manifolds are provided, like displaceable ones, unit cosphere bundles, prequantization circle bundles, Brieskorn spheres and …
Let E be a circle bundle over a Riemann surface that supports a contact structure transverse to the fibers. This paper presents a combinatorial definition of a differential graded algebra (DGA) that is an invariant of Legendrian knots in E. The invariant generalizes Chekanov's combinatorial DGA invariant of Legendrian knots in the standard contact 3-space using ideas from Eliashberg, Givental, and Hofer's contact homology. The main difficulty lies in dealing with what are ostensibly 1-parameter families of generators for the DGA; these are solved using ``Morse-Bott'' techniques. As an applicat…
The conormal Lagrangian $L_K$ of a knot $K$ in $\mathbb{R}^3$ is the submanifold of the cotangent bundle $T^* \mathbb{R}^3$ consisting of covectors along $K$ that annihilate tangent vectors to $K$. By intersecting with the unit cotangent bundle $S^* \mathbb{R}^3$, one obtains the unit conormal $Λ_K$, and the Legendrian contact homology of $Λ_K$ is a knot invariant of $K$, known as knot contact homology. We define a version of string topology for strings in $\mathbb{R}^3 \cup L_K$ and prove that this is isomorphic in degree 0 to knot contact homology. The string topology perspective gives a top…
