We establish some new existence results for global surfaces of section of dynamically convex Reeb flows on the three-sphere. These sections often have genus, and are the result of a combination of pseudo-holomorphic curve methods with some elementary ergodic methods.
We characterize which closed Reeb orbits of a dynamically convex contact form on the 3-sphere bound disk-like global surfaces of section for the Reeb flow, without any genericity assumptions. We show that these global surfaces of section come in families, organized as open book decompositions. As an application we obtain new global surfaces of section for the Hamiltonian dynamics on strictly convex 3-dimensional energy levels.
We exhibit sufficient conditions for a finite collection of periodic orbits of a Reeb flow on a closed $3$-manifold to bound a positive global surface of section with genus zero. These conditions turn out to be $C^\infty$-generically necessary. Moreover, they involve linking assumptions on periodic orbits with Conley-Zehnder index ranging in a finite set determined by the ambient contact geometry. As an application, we reprove and generalize a classical result of Birkhoff on the existence of annulus-like global surfaces of section for geodesic flows on positively curved two-spheres.
Let M be a closed manifold whose based loop space is ``complicated''. Examples are rationally hyperbolic manifolds and manifolds whose fundamental group has exponential growth. We prove that the topological entropy of any Reeb flow on the spherization of T*M is positive. Moreover, given q in M, for almost every q' in M the number of Reeb orbits from the fiber over q to the fiber over q' grows exponentially in time. If M is a surface of higher genus, we also obtain exponential growth of the number of closed Reeb orbits.
The first result of this paper is that every contact form on $\mathbb{R} P^3$ sufficiently $C^\infty$-close to a dynamically convex contact form admits an elliptic-parabolic closed Reeb orbit which is $2$-unknotted, has self-linking number $-1/2$ and transverse rotation number in $(1/2,1]$. Our second result implies that any $p$-unknotted periodic orbit with self-linking number $-1/p$ of a dynamically convex Reeb flow on a lens space of order $p$ is the binding of a rational open book decomposition, whose pages are global surfaces of section. As an application we show that in the planar circul…
In this paper we prove the existence of infinitely many closed Reeb orbits for a certain class of contact manifolds. This result can be viewed as a contact analogue of the Hamiltonian Conley conjecture. The manifolds for which the contact Conley conjecture is established are the pre-quantization circle bundles with aspherical base. As an application, we prove that for a surface of genus at least two with a non-vanishing magnetic field, the twisted geodesic flow has infinitely many periodic orbits on every low energy level.
We use Lerman's contact cut construction to find a sufficient condition for Hamiltonian diffeomorphisms of compact surfaces to embed into a closed 3-manifold as Poincaré return maps on a global surface of section for a Reeb flow. In particular, we show that the irrational pseudorotations of the 2-disc constructed by Fayad-Katok embed into the Reeb flow of a dynamically convex contact form on the 3-sphere.
We classify global surfaces of section for the Reeb flow of the standard contact form on the 3-sphere, defining the Hopf fibration. As an application, we prove the degree-genus formula for complex projective curves, using an elementary degeneration process inspired by the language of holomorphic buildings in symplectic field theory.
For $g>0$, we construct $g+1$ Legendrian embeddings of a surface of genus $g$ into $J^1(R^2)=R^5$ which lie in pairwise distinct Legendrian isotopy classes and which all have $g+1$ transverse Reeb chords ($g+1$ is the conjecturally minimal number of chords). Furthermore, for $g$ of the $g+1$ embeddings the Legendrian contact homology DGA does not admit any augmentation over $Z/2Z$, and hence cannot be linearized. We also investigate these surfaces from the point of view of the theory of generating families. Finally, we consider Legendrian spheres and planes in $J^1(S^2)$ from a similar perspec…
We exhibit the first examples of contact structures on $S^{2n-1}$ with $n\geq 4$ and on $S^3\times S^2$, all equipped with their standard smooth structures, for which every Reeb flow has positive topological entropy. As a new technical tool for the study of the volume growth of Reeb flows we introduce the notion of algebraic growth of wrapped Floer homology. Its power stems from its stability under several geometric operations on Liouville domains.
The main theme of this paper is the dynamics of Reeb flows with symmetries on the standard contact sphere. We introduce the notion of strong dynamical convexity for contact forms invariant under a group action, supporting the standard contact structure, and prove that in dimension $2n+1$ any such contact form satisfying a condition slightly weaker than strong dynamical convexity has at least $n+1$ simple closed Reeb orbits. For contact forms with antipodal symmetry, we prove that strong dynamical convexity is a consequence of ordinary convexity. In dimension five or greater, we construct examp…
Let $X \subset \mathbb{R}^4$ be a convex domain with smooth boundary $Y$. We use a relation between the extrinsic curvature of $Y$ and the Ruelle invariant $\text{Ru}(Y)$ of the natural Reeb flow on $Y$ to prove that there exist constants $C > c > 0$ independent of $Y$ such that \[c < \frac{\text{Ru}(Y)^2}{\text{vol}(X)} \cdot \text{sys}(Y) < C\] Here $\text{sys}(Y)$ is the systolic ratio, i.e. the square of the minimal period of a closed Reeb orbit of $Y$ divided by twice the volume of $X$. We then construct dynamically convex contact forms on $S^3$ that violate this bound using methods of Ab…
We give a sharp lower bound for the number of geometrically distinct contractible periodic orbits of dynamically convex Reeb flows on prequantizations of symplectic manifolds that are not aspherical. Several consequences of this result are obtained, like a new proof that every bumpy Finsler metric on $S^n$ carries at least two prime closed geodesics, multiplicity of elliptic and non-hyperbolic periodic orbits for dynamically convex contact forms with finitely many geometrically distinct contractible closed orbits and precise estimates of the number of even periodic orbits of perfect contact fo…
We explore the relationship between contact forms on $\mathbb S^3$ defined by Finsler metrics on $\mathbb S^2$ and the theory developed by H. Hofer, K. Wysocki and E. Zehnder in \cite{HWZ,HWZ1}. We show that a Finsler metric on $\mathbb S^2$ with curvature $K\geq 1$ and with all geodesic loops of length $>π$ is dynamically convex and hence it has either two or infinitely many closed geodesics. We also explain how to explicitly construct $J$-holomorphic embeddings of cylinders asymptotic to Reeb orbits of contact structures arising from Finsler metrics on $\mathbb S^2$ with K=1 thus complementi…
We construct the Ruelle invariant of a volume preserving flow and a symplectic cocycle in any dimension and prove several properties. In the special case of the linearized Reeb flow on the boundary of a convex domain $X$ in $\mathbb{R}^{2n}$, we prove that the Ruelle invariant $\text{Ru}(X)$, the period of the systole $c(X)$ and the volume $\text{vol}{X}$ satisfy \[\text{Ru}(X) \cdot c(X) \le C(n) \cdot \text{vol}{X}\] Here $C(n) > 0$ is an explicit constant dependent on $n$. As an application, we construct dynamically convex contact forms on $S^{2n-1}$ that are not convex, disproving the equi…