In this paper we consider the length minimizing properties of Hamiltonian paths generated by quasi-autonomous Hamiltonians on symplectically aspherical manifolds. Motivated by the work of L. Polterovich and M. Schwarz, we study the role of the fixed global extrema in the Floer complex of the generating Hamiltonian. Our main result determines a natural condition on a fixed global maximum of a Hamiltonian which implies that the corresponding path minimizes the positive Hofer length. We use this to prove that a quasi-autonomous Hamiltonian generates a length minimizing path if it has under-twisted fixed global extrema and no periodic orbits with period one and action greater than the fixed extrema. This, in turn, allows us to produce new examples of autonomous Hamiltonian flows which are length minimizing for all times. These constructions are based on the geometry of coisotropic submanifolds. Finally, we give a new proof of the recent theorem of D. McDuff which states that quasi-autonomous Hamiltonians generate length minimizing paths over short time intervals.
This is a survey article on symplectically aspherical manifolds. The paper contains a discussion on constructions of symplectically aspherical manifolds, their topological properties and the role of this class in symplectic topology. Research perspectives are discussed.
We describe all abelian groups which can appear as the fundamental groups of closed symplectically aspherical manifolds. The proofs use the theory of symplectic Lefschetz fibrations.
The main subjects of the paper is studying the fundamental groups of closed symplectically aspherical manifolds. Motivated by some results of Gompf, we introduce two classes of fundamental groups $π_1(M)$ of symplectically aspherical manifolds $M$ with $π_2(M)=0$ and $π_2(M)\neq 0$. Relations between these classes are discussed. We show that several important classes of groups can be realized in both classes, while some of groups can be realized in the first class but not in the second one. Also, we notice that there are some interesting dimensional phenomena in the realization problem. The ab…
We show that a generic Hamiltonian diffeomorphism on a closed symplectic manifold which is symplectically aspherical has at least the stable Morse number of fixed points - this is in line with a conjecture by Arnold.
We use spectral invariants in Lagrangian Floer theory in order to show that there exist \emph{isometric} embeddings of normed linear spaces (finite or infinite dimensional, depending on the case) into the space of Hamiltonian deformations of certain Lagrangian submanifolds in tame symplectically aspherical manifolds. In addition to providing a new class of examples in which the Lagrangian Hofer metric can be computed explicitly, we refine and generalize some known results about it.
The purpose of this paper is to study the relation between the $C^0$-topology and the topology induced by the spectral norm on the group of Hamiltonian diffeomorphisms of a closed symplectic manifold. Following the approach of Buhovsky-Humilière-Seyfaddini, we prove the $C^0$-continuity of the spectral norm for complex projective spaces and negative monotone symplectic manifolds. The case of complex projective spaces provides an alternative approach to the $C^0$-continuity of the spectral norm proven by Shelukhin. We also prove a partial $C^0$-continuity of the spectral norm for rational sympl…
We prove that the topological complexity of every symplectically atoroidal manifold is equal to twice its dimension. This is the analogue for topological complexity of a result of Rudyak and Oprea, who showed that the Lusternik--Schnirelmann category of a symplectically aspherical manifold equals its dimension. Symplectically hyperbolic manifolds are symplectically atoroidal, as are symplectically aspherical manifolds whose fundamental group does not contain free abelian subgroups of rank two. Thus we obtain many new calculations of topological complexity, including iterated surface bundles an…
Our first main result states that the spectral norm on the group of Hamiltonian diffeomorphisms, introduced in the works of Viterbo, Schwarz and Oh, is continuous with respect to the C^0 topology, when M is symplectically aspherical. This statement was previously proven only in the case of closed surfaces. As a corollary, using a recent result of Kislev and Shelukhin, we obtain C^0 continuity of barcodes on aspherical symplectic manifolds, and furthermore define barcodes for Hamiltonian homeomorphisms. We also present several applications to Hofer geometry and dynamics of Hamiltonian homeomorp…
We show that any symplectically aspherical/Calabi-Yau filling of $Y:=\partial(V\times \mathbb{D})$ has vanishing symplectic cohomology for any Liouville domain $V$. In particular, we make no topological requirement on the filling and $c_1(V)$ can be nonzero. Moreover, we show that for any symplectically aspherical/Calabi-Yau filling $W$ of $Y$, the interior $\mathring{W}$ is diffeomorphic to the interior of $V\times \mathbb{D}$ if $π_1(Y)$ is abelian and $\dim V\ge 4$. And $W$ is diffeomorphic to $V\times \mathbb{D}$ if moreover the Whitehead group of $π_1(Y)$ is trivial.
We show that a small neighborhood of a closed symplectic submanifold in a geometrically bounded aspherical symplectic manifold has non-vanishing symplectic homology. As a consequence, we establish the existence of contractible closed characteristics on any thickening of the boundary of the neighborhood. When applied to twisted geodesic flows on compact symplectically aspherical manifolds, this implies the existence of contractible periodic orbits for a dense set of low energy values.
We prove the Conley conjecture for a closed symplectically aspherical symplectic manifold: a Hamiltonian diffeomorphism of a such a manifold has infinitely many periodic points. More precisely, we show that a Hamiltonian diffeomorphism with finitely many fixed points has simple periodic points of arbitrarily large period. This theorem generalizes, for instance, a recent result of Hingston establishing the Conley conjecture for tori.
We compute the Lagrangian Floer cohomology groups of certain tori in closed simply connected symplectic 4-manifolds arising from Fintushel-Stern knot surgery. These manifolds are usually not symplectically aspherical. As a result of the computation we observe examples where $HF(L_0)\cong HF(L_1)$ and $L_0$ and $L_1$ are smoothly isotopic but $L_0,L_1$ are not symplectically isotopic and are distinguished by $HF(L_0,L_1)$.
We prove the Conley conjecture for cotangent bundles of oriented, closed manifolds, and Hamiltonians which are quadratic at infinity, i.e., we show that such Hamiltonians have infinitely many periodic orbits. For the conservative systems, similar results have been proved by Lu and Mazzucchelli using convex Hamiltonians and Lagrangian methods. Our proof uses Floer homological methods from Ginzburg's proof of the Conley Conjecture for closed symplectically aspherical manifolds.
On closed symplectically aspherical manifolds, Schwarz proved a classical result that the action function of a nontrivial Hamiltonian diffeomorphism is not constant by using Floer homology. In this article, we generalize Schwarz's theorem to the $C^0$-case on closed aspherical surfaces. Our methods involve the theory of transverse foliations for dynamical systems of surfaces inspired by Le Calvez and its recent progresses. As an application, we prove that the contractible fixed points set (and consequently the fixed points set) of a nontrivial Hamiltonian homeomorphism is not connected. Furthe…
In this paper, we study the behavior of the local Floer homology of an isolated fixed point and the growth of the action gap under iterations. To be more specific, we prove that an isolated fixed point of a Hamiltonian diffeomorphism remains isolated for a certain class of iterations (the so-called admissible iterations) and that the local Floer homology groups for all such iterations are isomorphic to each other up to a shift of degree. Furthermore, we study the pair-of-pants product in local Floer homology, and characterize a particular class of isolated fixed points (the symplectically dege…
We prove that for a certain class of closed monotone symplectic manifolds any Hamiltonian diffeomorphism with a hyperbolic fixed point must necessarily have infinitely many periodic orbits. Among the manifolds in this class are complex projective spaces, some Grassmannians, and also certain product manifolds such as the product of a projective space with a symplectically aspherical manifold of low dimension. A key to the proof of this theorem is the fact that the energy required for a Floer connecting trajectory to approach an iterated hyperbolic orbit and cross its fixed neighborhood is bound…
This paper is concerned with the rational symplectic field theory in the Floer case. For this observe that in the general geometric setup for symplectic field theory the contact manifolds can be replaced by mapping tori of symplectic manifolds with symplectomorphisms. While the cylindrical contact homology is given by the Floer homologies of powers of the symplectomorphism, the other algebraic invariants of symplectic field theory provide natural generalizations of symplectic Floer homology. For symplectically aspherical manifolds and Hamiltonian symplectomorphisms we study the moduli spaces o…
We define $S^1$-equivariant symplectic homology for symplectically aspherical manifolds with contact boundary, using a Floer-type construction first proposed by Viterbo. We show that it is related to the usual symplectic homology by a Gysin exact sequence. As an important ingredient of the proof, we define a parametrized version of symplectic homology, corresponding to families of Hamiltonian functions indexed by a finite dimensional smooth parameter space.
In 2002 Polterovich has notably established that on closed aspherical symplectic manifolds, Hamiltonian diffeomorphisms of finite order, which we call Hamiltonian torsion, must in fact be trivial. In this paper we prove the first higher-dimensional Hamiltonian no-torsion theorems beyond the symplectically aspherical case. We start by showing that closed symplectic Calabi-Yau and negative monotone symplectic manifolds do not admit Hamiltonian torsion. Going still beyond topological constraints, we prove that every closed positive monotone symplectic manifold $(M,ω)$ admitting Hamiltonian torsio…
Let $p \geq 2$ be a prime, and $\mathbb{F}_p$ be the field with $p$ elements. Extending a result of Seidel for $p=2,$ we construct an isomorphism between the Floer cohomology of an exact or Hamiltonian symplectomorphism $ϕ,$ with $\mathbb{F}_p$ coefficients, and the $\mathbb{Z}/p \mathbb{Z}$-equivariant Tate Floer cohomology of its $p$-th power $ϕ^p.$ The construction involves a Kaledin-type quasi-Frobenius map, as well as a $\mathbb{Z}/p \mathbb{Z}$-equivariant pants product: an equivariant operation with $p$ inputs and $1$ output. Our method of proof involves a spectral sequence for the acti…
Schwarz showed that when a closed symplectic manifold (M,\om) is symplectically aspherical (i.e. the symplectic form and the first Chern class vanish on π_2(M)) then the spectral invariants, which are initially defined on the universal cover of the Hamiltonian group, descend to the Hamiltonian group Ham (M,\om). In this note we describe less stringent conditions on the Chern class and quantum homology of M under which the (asymptotic) spectral invariants descend to Ham (M,\om). For example, they descend if the quantum multiplication of M is undeformed and H_2(M) has rank >1, or if the minimal …
