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 conjecture: Existence of closed characteristics (one associated to each nontrivial $α$) on hypersurfaces in $T^*M$ which are of contact type and contain the zero section.
We show that the existence of noncontractible periodic orbits for compactly supported time-dependent Hamiltonian on the disk cotangent bundle of a Finsler manifold provided that the Hamiltonian is sufficiently large over the zero section. We generalize the BPS capacities and earlier constructions of Weber (2006 Duke Math. J. 133, 527-568) and other authors Biran et al (2003 Duke Math. J. 119, 65-118) to the Finsler setting. We then obtain a number of applications including: (1) generalizing the main theorem of Xue (2017 J. Symplectic Geom. 15, 905-936) to the Lie group setting, (2) preservatio…
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…
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.
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 …
This is the first of a series of papers on foundations of Floer theory. We give an axiomatic treatment of the geometric notion of a semi-infinite cycle. Using this notion, we introduce a bordism version of Floer theory for the cotangent bundle of a compact manifold M. Our construction is geometric and does not require the compactness and gluing results traditionally used to setup Floer theory. Finally, we prove a bordism version of Viterbo's theorem relating Floer bordism of the cotangent bundle to the ordinary bordism groups of the free loop space of M.
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…
The objective of this note is to prove an existence result for brake orbits in classical Hamiltonian systems (which was first proved by S.V.Bolotin) by using Floer theory. To this end, we compute an open string analogue of symplectic homology (so called wrapped Floer homology) of some domains in cotangent bundles, which appear naturally in the study of classical Hamiltonian systems. The main part of the computations is to show invariance of wrapped Floer homology under certain handle attaching to domains.
Consider a classical Hamiltonian H on the cotangent bundle T*M of a closed orientable manifold M, and let L:TM -> R be its Legendre-dual Lagrangian. In a previous paper we constructed an isomorphism Phi from the Morse complex of the Lagrangian action functional which is associated to L to the Floer complex which is determined by H. In this paper we give an explicit construction of a homotopy inverse Psi of Phi. Contrary to other previously defined maps going in the same direction, Psi is an isomorphism at the chain level and preserves the action filtration. Its definition is based on counting …
Let M be a closed, oriented, n-dimensional manifold. In this paper we describe a spectrum in the sense of homotopy theory, Z(T^*M), whose homology is naturally isomorphic to the Floer homology of the cotangent bundle, T^*M. This Floer homology is taken with respect to a Hamiltonian H: S^1 x T^*M --> R, which is quadratic near infinity. Z(T^*M) is constructed assuming a basic smooth gluing result of J-holomorphic cylinders. This spectrum will have a C.W decomposition with one cell for every periodic solution of the equation defined by the Hamiltonian vector field X_H. Its induced cellular chain…
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.
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 investigate the question of whether the spectral metric on the orbit space of a fiber in the disk cotangent bundle of a closed manifold, under the action of the compactly supported Hamiltonian diffeomorphism group, is bounded. We utilize wrapped Floer cohomology to define the spectral invariant of an admissible Lagrangian submanifold within a Weinstein domain. We show that the pseudo-metric derived from this spectral invariant is a valid $Ham$-invariant metric. Furthermore, we establish that the spectral metric on the orbit space of an admissible Lagrangian is bounded if and only if the wra…
We prove the finiteness of the Hofer-Zehnder capacity of unit disk cotangent bundles of closed Riemannian manifolds, under some simple topological assumptions on the manifolds. The key ingredient of the proof is a computation of the pair-of-pants product on Floer homology of cotangent bundles. We reduce it to a simple computation of the loop product, making use of results of A.Abbondandolo- M.Schwarz.
Let $S$ be a closed orientable spin manifold. Let $K \subset S$ be a submanifold and denote its complement by $M_K$. In this paper we prove that there exists an isomorphism between partially wrapped Floer cochains of a cotangent fiber stopped by the unit conormal $\varLambda_K$ and chains of a Morse theoretic model of the based loop space of $M_K$, which intertwines the $A_\infty$-structure with the Pontryagin product. As an application, we restrict to codimension 2 spheres $K \subset S^n$ where $n = 5$ or $n\geq 7$. Then we show that there is a family of knots $K$ so that the partially wrappe…
We define the Floer complex for Hamiltonian orbits on the cotangent bundle of a compact manifold satisfying non-local conormal boundary conditions. We prove that the homology of this chain complex is isomorphic to the singular homology of the natural path space associated to the boundary conditions.
We construct a family version of symplectic Floer cohomology for magnetic cotangent bundles, without any restrictions on the magnetic form, using the dissipative method for compactness introduced in \cite{Groman2015}. As an application, we deduce that if $N$ is a closed manifold and $ σ$ is a magnetic form that is not weakly exact, then the $ π_1$-sensitive Hofer-Zehnder capacity of any compact set in the magnetic cotangent bundle determined by $ σ$ is finite.
We consider exact Lagrangian submanifolds in cotangent bundles. Under certain additional restrictions (triviality of the fundamental group of the cotangent bundle, and of the Maslov class and second Stiefel-Whitney class of the Lagrangian submanifold) we prove such submanifolds are Floer-cohomologically indistinguishable from the zero-section. This implies strong restrictions on their topology. An essentially equivalent result was recently proved independently by Nadler, using a different approach.
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.
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 $V$.
Let $N$ be a closed manifold and $U \subset T^*(N)$ a bounded domain in the cotangent bundle of $N$, containing the zero-section. A conjecture due to Viterbo asserts that the spectral metric for Lagrangian submanifolds that are exact-isotopic to the zero-section is bounded. In this paper we establish an upper bound on the spectral distance between two such Lagrangians $L_0, L_1$, which depends linearly on the boundary depth of the Floer complexes of $(L_0, F)$ and $(L_1, F)$, where $F$ is a fiber of the cotangent bundle.
For a simply-connected compact semisimple Lie group $G$ and its maximal torus $T$, we study the $A_{\infty}$-functor associated to the moment Lagrangian correspondence from the cotangent bundle $T^*G$ to the square $G/T^{-} \times G/T$. In particular, we compute the leading term of the $A_{\infty}$-homomorphism from the wrapped Floer cohomology $HW^*(T^*_e G, T^*_e G)$ of the cotangent fiber $T_e^*G$ to the Floer cohomology $HF^*(Δ, Δ)$ of the diagonal $Δ$ in the square $G/T^{-} \times G/T$ by determining the count of certain pseudo-holomorphic quilts. As a consequence, we prove that the Floer…
We give an explicit computation of the ring structure in wrapped Floer homology of a class of real Lagrangians in $A_k$-type Milnor fibers. In the $A_k$-type plumbing description, those Lagrangians correspond to the cotangent fibers or the diagonal Lagrangians. The main ingredient of the computation is to apply a version of the Seidel representation. For a technical reason, we first carry out computations in v-shaped wrapped Floer homology, and this in turn gives the desired ring structure via the Viterbo transfer map.
In a previous paper, the author introduced a Floer-theoretic torsion invariant I_F, which roughly takes the form of a product of a power series counting perturbed pseudo-holomorphic tori, and the Reidemeister torsion of the symplectic Floer complex. We pointed out the formal resemblance of I_F with a generating function of genus 1 Gromov invariant; furthermore, for heuristic reasons one also expects a relation with the 1-loop generating function in the A-model side of mirror symmetry, which counts genus 1 holomorphic curves. The present article makes this expected relation precise in the simpl…
The results in this paper concern computations of Floer cohomology using generating functions. The first part proves the isomorphism between Floer cohomology and Generating function cohomology introduced by Lisa Traynor. The second part proves that the Floer cohomology of the cotangent bundle (in the sense of Part I), is isomorphic to the cohomology of the loop space of the base. This has many consequences, some of which were given in Part I (GAFA, Geom. funct. anal. Vol. 9 (1999) 985-1033), others will be given in forthcoming papers. The results in this paper had been announced (with indicati…
The main result asserts the existence of noncontractible periodic orbits for compactly supported time dependent Hamiltonian systems on the unit cotangent bundle of the torus or of a negatively curved manifold whenever the generating Hamiltonian is sufficiently large over the zero section. The proof is based on Floer homology and on the notion of a relative symplectic capacity. Applications include results about propagation properties of sequential Hamiltonian systems, periodic orbits on hypersurfaces, Hamiltonian circle actions, and smooth Lagrangian skeletons in Stein manifolds.
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 prove that symplectic cohomology for open convex symplectic manifolds is invariant when the symplectic form undergoes deformations which may be non-exact and non-compactly supported, provided one uses the correct local system of coefficients in Floer theory. As a sample application beyond the Liouville setup, we describe in detail the symplectic cohomology for disc bundles in the twisted cotangent bundle of surfaces, and we deduce existence results for periodic magnetic geodesics on surfaces. In particular, we show the existence of geometrically distinct orbits by exploiting properties of t…
The Rabinowitz-Floer homology of a Liouville domain W is the Floer homology of the free period Hamiltonian action functional associated to a Hamiltonian whose zero energy level is the boundary of W. It has been introduced by K. Cieliebak and U. Frauenfelder. Together with A. Oancea, the same authors have recently computed the Rabinowitz-Floer homology of the cotangent disk bundle D^*M of a closed manifold M, by establishing a long exact sequence. The first aim of this paper is to present a chain level construction of this exact sequence. In fact, we show that this sequence is the long homology…
We describe various approaches to understanding Fukaya categories of cotangent bundles. All of the approaches rely on introducing a suitable class of noncompact Lagrangian submanifolds. We review the work of Nadler-Zaslow (math/0604379, math/0612399) and the authors (math/0701783), before discussing a new approach using family Floer cohomology and the ``wrapped Fukaya category''. The latter, inspired by Viterbo's symplectic homology, emphasises the connection to loop spaces, hence seems particularly suitable when trying to extend the existing theory beyond the simply-connected case.
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…
The Floer homology of a cotangent bundle is isomorphic to loop space homology of the underlying manifold, as proved by Abbondandolo-Schwarz, Salamon-Weber, and Viterbo. In this paper we show that in the presence of a Dirac magnetic monopole which admits a primitive with sublinear growth on the universal cover, the Floer homology in atoroidal free homotopy classes is again isomorphic to loop space homology. As a consequence we prove that for any atoroidal free homotopy class and any sufficiently small T>0, any magnetic flow associated to the Dirac magnetic monopole has a closed orbit of period …
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…
For a class of Riemannian manifolds that include products of arbitrary compact manifolds with manifolds of nonpositive sectional curvature on the one hand, or with certain positive-curvature examples such as spheres of dimension at least 3 and compact semisimple Lie groups on the other, we show that the Hamiltonian diffeomorphism group of the cotangent bundle contains as subgroups infinite-dimensional normed vector spaces that are bi-Lipschitz embedded with respect to Hofer's metric; moreover these subgroups can be taken to consist of diffeomorphisms supported in an arbitrary neighborhood of t…
We study the dynamics and symplectic topology of energy hypersurfaces of mechanical Hamiltonians on twisted cotangent bundles. We pay particular attention to periodic orbits, displaceability, stability and the contact type property, and the changes that occur at the Mane critical value c. Our main tool is Rabinowitz Floer homology. We show that it is defined for hypersurfaces that are either stable tame or virtually contact, and it is invariant under under homotopies in these classes. If the configuration space admits a metric of negative curvature, then Rabinowitz Floer homology does not vani…
In this paper we construct, in all odd complex dimensions, pairs of Liouville domains W_0 and W_1 which are diffeomorphic to the cotangent bundle of the sphere with one extra subcritical handle, but are not symplectomorphic. While W_0 is symplectically very similar to the cotangent bundle itself, W_1 is more unusual. We use Seidel's exact triangles for Floer cohomology to show that the wrapped Fukaya category of W_1 is trivial. As a corollary we obtain that W_1 contains no compact exact Lagrangian submanifolds.
We show that the Lagrangian torus in the cotangent bundles of the 2-sphere obtained by applying the geodesic flow to the unit circle in a fibre is not displaceable by computing its Lagrangian Floer homology. The computation is based on a symmetry argument.
The planar circular restricted three body problem (PCRTBP) is symmetric with respect to the line of masses and there is a corresponding anti-symplectic involution on the cotangent bundle of the 2-sphere in the regularized PCRTBP. Recently it was shown that each bounded component of an energy hypersurface with low energy for the regularized PCRTBP is fiberwise starshaped. This enable us to define a Lagrangian Rabinowitz Floer homology which is related to periodic orbits symmetric for the anti-symplectic involution in the regularized PCRTBP and hence to symmetric periodic orbits in the unregular…
We develop a variant of Lusternik-Schnirelmann theory for the shift operator in equivariant Floer and symplectic homology. Our key result is that the spectral invariants are strictly decreasing under the action of the shift operator when periodic orbits are isolated. As an application, we prove new multiplicity results for simple closed Reeb orbits on the standard contact sphere, the unit cotangent bundle to the sphere and some other contact manifolds. We also show that the lower Conley--Zehnder index enjoys a certain recurrence property and revisit and reprove from a different perspective a v…
Contact action functional, calculus of variation and canonical generating function of Legendrian submanifolds
Center for Geometry and Physics, Institute for Basic Science (IBS)（基础科学研究所几何物理中心）；POSTECH（浦项科技大学）；CNRS, Laboratoire de Mathématiques Jean Leray, Nantes Université（法国国家科学研究中心让·勒雷数学实验室南特大学）
This is a research monograph on symplectic cohomology (disguised as an advanced graduate textbook), which provides a construction of this version of Hamiltonian Floer cohomology for cotangent bundles of closed manifolds. The focus is on the aspects of the theory that have been neglected in the literature: (1) the base is not assumed to be orientable or Spin, (2) local systems on the free loop space are used to define twisted versions of Floer cohomology, (3) a (twisted) Batalin-Vilkovisky structure is constructed, and (4) the BV relation is verified. In this setting (i.e. with all the appropri…
