We prove the following three results in Hamiltonian dynamics.
1. The Weinstein conjecture holds true for every displaceable hypersurface of contact type. 2. Every magnetic flow on a closed Riemannian manifold has contractible closed orbits for a dense set of small energies. 3. Every closed Lagrangian submanifold of an arbitrary symplectic manifold whose fundamental group injects and which admits a Riemannian metric without closed geodesics has the intersection property.
We prove that on certain closed symplectic manifolds a $C^1$-generic cyclic subgroup of the universal cover of the group of Hamiltonian diffeomorphisms is undistorted with respect to the Hofer metric.
Let $Σ$ be a compact surface equipped with an area form. There is an long standing open question by Katok, which, in particular, asks whether every entropy-zero Hamiltonian diffeomorphism of a surface lies in the $C^0$-closure of the set of integrable diffeomorphisms. A natural generalization of this question is to ask to what extent one family of `simple' Hamiltonian diffeomorphisms of $Σ$ can be approximated by the other. In this paper we show that the set of autonomous Hamiltonian diffeomorphisms is not Hofer-dense in the set of integrable Hamiltonians. We construct explicit examples of int…
We find robust obstructions to representing a Hamiltonian diffeomorphism as a full $k$-th power, $k \geq 2,$ and in particular, to including it into a one-parameter subgroup. The robustness is understood in the sense of Hofer's metric. Our approach is based on the theory of persistence modules applied in the context of filtered Floer homology. We present applications to geometry and dynamics of Hamiltonian diffeomorphisms.
Let D be a non-displaceable disk in an annulus A. Suppose that g is a compactly supported Hamiltonian which preserves D with translation number n. We show that Hofer's norm |g| is bounded from below by cn for a certain constant c. We also give example of such Hamiltonian which is more efficient than the obvious rotation of D.
In this article we show that the braid type of a set of $1$-periodic orbits of a non-degenerate Hamiltonian diffeomorphism on a surface is stable under perturbations which are sufficiently small with respect to the Hofer metric $d_{\rm Hofer}$. We call this new phenomenon braid stability for the Hofer metric. We apply braid stability to study the stability of the topological entropy $h_{\rm top}$ of Hamiltonian diffeomorphisms on surfaces with respect to small perturbations with respect to $d_{\rm Hofer}$. We show that $h_{\rm top}$ is lower semicontinuous on the space of Hamiltonian diffeomor…
We introduce the concept of Hofer-Zehnder $G$-semicapacity (or $G$-sensitive Hofer-Zehnder capacity) and prove that given a geometrically bounded symplectic manifold $(M,ω)$ and an open subset $N \subset M$ endowed with a Hamiltonian free circle action $ϕ$ then $N$ has bounded Hofer-Zehnder $G_ϕ$-semicapacity, where $G_ϕ\subset π_1(N)$ is the subgroup generated by the homotopy class of the orbits of $ϕ$. In particular, $N$ has bounded Hofer-Zehnder capacity. We give two types of applications of the main result. Firstly, we prove that the cotangent bundle of a compact manifold endowed with a fr…
We show that commutators of Hamiltonian diffeomorphisms may have arbitrarily large Hofer norm. The proposed technique is applicable to positive genus surfaces and their products. This gives partial answer to a question by McDuff and Polterovich.
Let $Σ$ be a compact surface of genus $g \geq 1$ equipped with an area form. We construct eggbeater Hamiltonian diffeomorphisms which lie arbitrarily far in the Hofer metric from the set of autonomous Hamiltonians. This result is already known for $g \geq 2$ (our argument provides an alternative, very simple construction compared to previous publications) while the case $g = 1$ is new.
We give a different and simpler proof of a slightly modified (and weaker) variant of a recent theorem of Shelukhin extending Franks' "two-or-infinitely-many" theorem to Hamiltonian diffeomorphisms in higher dimensions and establishing a sufficiently general case of the Hofer-Zehnder conjecture. A few ingredients of our proof are common with Shelukhin's original argument, the key of which is Seidel's equivariant pair-of-pants product, but the new proof highlights a different aspect of the periodic orbit dynamics of Hamiltonian diffeomorphisms.
We construct an embedding $Φ$ of $[0,1]^{\infty}$ into $Ham(M, ω)$, the group of Hamiltonian diffeomorphisms of a suitable closed symplectic manifold $(M, ω)$. We then prove that $Φ$ is in fact a quasi-isometry. After imposing further assumptions on $(M, ω)$, we adapt our methods to construct a similar embedding of $\mathbb{R} \oplus [0,1]^{\infty}$ into either $Ham(M, ω)$ or $\widetilde{Ham}(M, ω)$, the universal cover of $Ham(M, ω)$. Along the way, we prove results related to the filtered Floer chain complexes of radially symmetric Hamiltonians. Our proofs rely heavily on a continuity result…
Let $(M,ω)$ be an aspherical symplectic manifold, which is closed or convex. Let $U$ be an open set in $M$, which admits a circle action generated by an autonomous Hamiltonian $H \in C^\infty(U)$, such that each orbit of the circle action is not contractible in $M$. Under these assumptions, we prove that the Hofer-Zehnder capacity of $U$ is bounded by the Hofer norm of $H$. The proof uses a variant of the energy-capacity inequality, which is proved by the theory of action selectors.
We compare Hofer's geometries on two spaces associated with a closed symplectic manifold M. The first space is the group of Hamiltonian diffeomorphisms. The second space L consists of all Lagrangian submanifolds of $M \times M$ which are exact Lagrangian isotopic to the diagonal. We show that in the case of a closed symplectic manifold with $π_2(M) = 0$, the canonical embedding of Ham(M) into L, f $\mapsto$ graph(f) is not an isometric embedding, although it preserves Hofer's length of smooth paths.
In this article we study persistence features of topological entropy and periodic orbit growth of Hamiltonian diffeomorphisms on surfaces with respect to Hofer's metric. We exhibit stability of these dynamical quantities in a rather strong sense for a specific family of maps introduced by Polterovich and Shelukhin. A crucial ingredient comes from some enhancement of lower bounds for the topological entropy and orbit growth forced by a periodic point, formulated in terms of the geometric self-intersection number and a variant of Turaev's cobracket of the free homotopy class that it induces. Tho…
Hofer's norm (metric) is an important and interesting topic in symplectic geometry. In the present paper, we define fragmented Hofer's norms which are Hofer's norms controlled by fragmentation norms and give some observations on fragmented Hofer's norms.
Stefan M$\ddot{\mathrm{u}}$ller posed the problem "Do Hofer's metrics on the group of Hamiltonian diffeomorphism and the one of Hamiltonian homeomorphisms (Hameomorphisms) correspond?". Let $(M,ω)$ be a compact exact symplectic manifold. We prove that the group of Hamiltonian homeomorphisms is not a simple group if the positive answer of M$\ddot{\mathrm{u}}$ller's question holds . To prove this results, we introduce fragmented Hofer's norms on a normal subgroup of the group of Hamiltonian homeomorphisms.
A Hamiltonian circle action on a compact symplectic manifold is known to be a closed geodesic with respect to the Hofer metric on the group of Hamiltonian diffeomorphisms. If the momentum map attains its minimum or maximum at an isolated fixed point with isotropy weights not all equal to plus or minus one, then this closed geodesic can be deformed into a loop of shorter Hofer length. In this paper we give a lower bound for the possible amount of shortening, and we give a lower bound for the index ("number of independent shortening directions"). If the minimum or maximum is attained along a sub…
In this paper, we generalize the result from L. Polterovich and E. Shelukhin's paper stating that Hofer distance from time-dependent Hamiltonian diffeomorphism to the set of p-th power Hamiltonian diffeomorphism can be arbitrarily large to hold in the product structure $Σ_g \times M$ for any closed symplectic manifold $M$ when $p$ is sufficiently large and $g \geq 4$. This implies that, on this product, Hofer distance can be arbitrarily large between time-dependent Hamiltonian diffeomorphism and autonomous Hamiltonian diffeomorphism.The basic tool we use is barcode and singular value decomposi…
Let $(M,ω)$ be a symplectic manifold and $U\subseteq M$ an open subset. We study the natural inclusion of the compactly supported Hamiltonian group of $U$ in the compactly supported Hamiltonian group of $M$. The main result is an upper bound for this map in terms of the Hofer norms for $U$ and $M$. Applications are upper bounds on the asymptotic Hofer-Lipschitz constant and the relative Hofer diameter of $U$. The first bound is often sharp and the second one is often sharp up to a factor of 2.
We prove that if a Hamiltonian diffeomorphism of a closed monotone symplectic manifold with semisimple quantum homology has more contractible fixed points, counted homologically, than the total dimension of the homology of the manifold, then it must have an infinite number of contractible periodic points. This constitutes a higher-dimensional homological generalization of a celebrated result of Franks from 1992, as conjectured by Hofer and Zehnder in 1994.
We resolve three longstanding questions related to the large scale geometry of the group of Hamiltonian diffeomorphisms of the two-sphere, equipped with Hofer's metric. Namely: (1) we resolve the Kapovich-Polterovich question by showing that this group is not quasi-isometric to the real line; (2) more generally, we show that the kernel of Calabi over any proper open subset is unbounded; and (3) we show that the group of area and orientation preserving homeomorphisms of the two-sphere is not a simple group. We also obtain, as a corollary, that the group of area-preserving diffeomorphisms of the…
We use the criteria of Lalonde and McDuff to show that a path that is generated by a generic autonomous Hamiltonian is length minimizing with respect to the Hofer norm among all homotopic paths provided that it induces no non-constant closed trajectories in M. This generalizes a result of Hofer for symplectomorphisms of Euclidean space. The proof for general M uses Liu-Tian's construction of S^1-invariant virtual moduli cycles. As a corollary, we find that any semifree action of S^1 on M gives rise to a nontrivial element in the fundamental group of the symplectomorphism group of M. We also es…
In this paper we first apply the chain level Floer theory to the study of Hofer's geometry of Hamiltonian diffeomorphism group in the cases without quantum contribution: we prove that any quasi-autonomous Hamiltonian path on weakly exact symplectic manifolds or any autonomous Hamiltonian path on arbitrary symplectic manifolds is length minimizing in its homotopy class with fixed ends, as long as it has a fixed maximum and a fixed minimum which are not over-twisted and all of its contractible periodic orbits of period less than one are sufficiently $C^1$-small. Next we give a construction of ne…
Hofer's metric is a bi-invariant metric on Hamiltonian diffeomorphism groups. Our main result shows that the topology induced from Hofer's metric is weaker than C^1-topology if the symplectic manifold is closed.
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.
Let L denote the space of Lagrangians Hamiltonian isotopic to the standard Lagrangian in the unit ball in Euclidean space. We prove that the Lagrangian Hofer distance on L is unbounded.
We prove that the displacement energy of a stable coisotropic submanifold is bounded away from zero if the ambient symplectic manifold is closed, rational and satisfies a mild topological condition.
We introduce the Hofer-Zehnder $G$-semicapacity $c_{HZ}^G(M,\om)$ of a symplectic manifold $(M,\om)$ with respect to a subgroup $G \subset π_1(M)$ ($c_{HZ}(M,\om) \leq c^G_{HZ}(M,\om)$) and prove that if $(M,\om)$ is tame and there exists an open subset $U \subset M$ admitting a Hamiltonian free circle action with order greater than two then $U$ has bounded Hofer-Zehnder $G$-semicapacity, where $G \subset π_1(M)$ is the subgroup generated by the orbits of the action, provided that the index of rationality of $(M,\om)$ is sufficiently great (for instance, if $[\om]|_{π_2(M)}=0$). We give a lot …
The purpose of this note is to make some connection between the sub-Riemannian geometry on Carnot-Caratheodory groups and symplectic geometry. We shall concentrate here on the Heisenberg group, although it is transparent that almost everything can be done on a general Carnot-Caratheodory group. Such generalisations will be the subject of a forthcoming note.
Let M be a closed symplectic manifold, and let | | be a norm on the space of all smooth functions on M, which are zero-mean normalized with respect to the canonical volume form. We show that if | | is dominated from above by the L-Infinity-norm, and | | is invariant under the action of Hamiltonian diffeomorphisms, then it is also invariant under all volume preserving diffeomorphisms. We also prove that if | | is, additionally, not equivalent to the L-Infinity-norm, then the induced Finsler metric on the group of Hamiltonian diffeomorphisms on M vanishes identically.
In this note we consider the following conjecture: given any closed symplectic manifold $M$, there is a sufficiently small real positive number $ρ$ such that the open ball of radius $ρ$ in the Hofer metric centered at the identity on the group of Hamiltonian diffeomorphisms of $M$ is contractible, where the retraction takes place in that ball -- this is the strong version of the conjecture -- or inside the ambient group of Hamiltonian diffeomorphisms of $M$ -- this is the weak version of the conjecture. We prove several results that support that weak form of the conjecture.
To every closed subset $X$ of a symplectic manifold $(M,ω)$ we associate a natural group of Hamiltonian diffeomorphisms $Ham(X,ω)$. We equip this group with a semi-norm $\Vert\cdot\Vert^{X,ω}$, generalizing the Hofer norm. We discuss $Ham(X,ω)$ and $\Vert\cdot\Vert^{X,ω}$ if $X$ is a symplectic or isotropic submanifold. The main result involves the relative Hofer diameter of $X$ in $M$. Its first part states that for the unit sphere in $R^{2n}$ this diameter is bounded below by $\frac\pi2$, if $n\geq2$. Its second part states that for $n\geq2$ and $d\geq n+1$ there exists a compact set in $R^{…
Let $γ$ be a non-degenerate Ustilovsky geodesic in $Ham (M, ω)$ generated by $H$. We give a simple proof of a generalization of the conjecture stated in \cite{virtmorse}, relating the Morse index of $ γ$, as a critical point of the Hofer length functional, with the Conley Zehnder index of the extremizers of $H$, considered as periodic orbits.
Given a closed symplectic manifold $(M,ω)$ we introduce a certain quantity associated to a tuple of conjugacy classes in the universal cover of the group ${\hbox{\it Ham}} (M,ω)$ by means of the Hofer metric on ${\hbox{\it Ham}} (M,ω)$. We use pseudo-holomorphic curves involved in the definition of the multiplicative structure on the Floer cohomology of a symplectic manifold $(M,ω)$ to estimate this quantity in terms of actions of some periodic orbits of related Hamiltonian flows. As a corollary we get a new way to obtain Agnihotri-Belkale-Woodward inequalities for eigenvalues of products of u…
We remark that, as in the symplectic case, the Hofer norm on the Hamiltonian group of a Poisson manifold is non-degenerate. The proof is a straightforward application of tools from symplectic topology.
In this paper, we use Floer theory to study the Hofer length functional for paths of Hamiltonian diffeomorphisms which are sufficiently short. In particular, the length minimizing properties of a short Hamiltonian path are related to the properties and number of its periodic orbits.
This paper meticulously revisit and study the flux geometry of any compact oriented manifold $(M; W)$. We generalize several well-known factorization results, exhibit some orbital conditions for the study of flux geometry, give a proof of the discreteness of the flux group for volume-preserving diffeomorphisms, show that any smooth path in the kernel of the flux is a vanishing flux path, and show that the kernel of the flux for volume-preserving diffeomorphisms is $C^1$closed inside the group of all volume-preserving diffeomorphisms isotopic to the identity map:This recovers several results fr…
We show that if (M,ω) is a closed symplectic manifold which admits a nontrivial Hamiltonian vector field all of whose contractible closed orbits are constant, then Hofer's metric on the group of Hamiltonian diffeomorphisms of (M,ω) has infinite diameter, and indeed admits infinite-dimensional quasi-isometrically embedded normed vector spaces. A similar conclusion applies to Hofer's metric on various spaces of Lagrangian submanifolds, including those Hamiltonian-isotopic to the diagonal in M x M when M satisfies the above dynamical condition. To prove this, we use the properties of a Floer-theo…
There is a number of known constructions of quasimorphisms on Hamiltonian groups. We show that on surfaces many of these quasimorphisms are not compatible with the Hofer norm in a sense they are not continuous and not Lipschitz. The only exception known to the author is the Calabi quasimorphism on a sphere and the induced quasimorphisms on genus-zero surfaces.
The main theme of this paper is a relative version of the almost existence theorem for periodic orbits of autonomous Hamiltonian systems. We show that almost all low levels of a function on a geometrically bounded symplectically aspherical manifold carry contractible periodic orbits of the Hamiltonian flow, provided that the function attains its minimum along a closed symplectic submanifold. As an immediate consequence, we obtain the existence of contractible periodic orbits on almost all low energy levels for twisted geodesic flows with symplectic magnetic field. We give examples of functions…
In this article we study the Hofer geometry of a compact Lie group $K$ which acts by Hamiltonian diffeomorphisms on a symplectic manifold $M$. Generalized Hofer norms on the Lie algebra of $K$ are introduced and analyzed with tools from group invariant convex geometry, functional and matrix analysis. Several global results on the existence of geodesics and their characterization in finite dimensional Lie groups $K$ endowed with bi-invariant Finsler metrics are proved. We relate the conditions for being a geodesic in the group $K$ and in the group of Hamiltonian diffeomorphisms. These results a…
We study the class of norms on the space of smooth functions on a closed symplectic manifold, which are invariant under the action of the group of Hamiltonian diffeomorphisms. Our main result shows that any such norm that is continuous with respect to the $C^{\infty}$-topology, is dominated from above by the $L_{\infty}$-norm. As a corollary, we obtain that any bi-invariant Finsler pseudo-metric on the group of Hamiltonian diffeomorphisms that is generated by an invariant norm that satisfies the aforementioned continuity assumption, is either identically zero or equivalent to Hofer's metric.
For many classes of symplectic manifolds, the Hamiltonian flow of a function with sufficiently large variation must have a fast periodic orbit. This principle is the base of the notion of Hofer-Zehnder capacity and some other symplectic invariants and leads to numerous results concerning existence of periodic orbits of Hamiltonian flows. Along these lines, we show that given a negatively curved manifold M, a neigbhourhood U of M in the cotangent bundle, a sufficiently small magnetic field and a non-trivial free homotopy class of loops, then the magnetic flow of a Hamiltonian with big enough va…
We prove the elementary but surprising fact that the Hofer distance between two closed subsets of a symplectic manifold can be expressed in terms of the restrictions of Hamiltonians to one of the subsets; this helps explain certain energy-capacity inequalities that appeared recently in work of Borman-McLean and Humiliere-Leclercq-Seyfaddini. We also build on arXiv:1201.2926 to obtain new vanishing results for the Hofer distance between subsets, applicable for instance to singular analytic subvarieties of Kahler manifolds.
