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.
Our main result is the $\mathcal{C}^0$-rigidity of the area spectrum and the Maslov class of Lagrangian submanifolds. This relies on the existence of punctured pseudoholomorphic discs in cotangent bundles with boundary on the zero section, whose boundaries represent any integral homology class. We discuss further applications of these punctured discs in symplectic geometry.
Let $M$ be a manifold and $Λ$ a compact exact connected Lagrangian submanifold of $T^*M$. We can associate with $Λ$ a conic Lagrangian submanifold $Λ'$ of $T^*(M\times R)$. We prove that there exists a canonical sheaf $F$ on $M\times R$ whose microsupport is $Λ'$ outside the zero section. We deduce the already known results that the Maslov class of $Λ$ is $0$ and that the projection from $Λ$ to $M$ induces isomorphisms between the homotopy groups.
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…
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）
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 short and fairly informal note is an attempt to explain how methods of homological algebra may be brought to bear on problems in symplectic geometry. We do this by looking at a familiar sample question, which is that of the topology of Lagrangian submanifolds in the cotangent bundle of the sphere.
We give topological obstructions to the existence of a closed exact Lagrangian submanifold in the cotangent bundle of a closed manifold M which is the total space of a fibration over the circle. For instance we show that the fundamental group of such a Lagrangian submanifold cannot be the free product of two non-trivial groups and that in any finite presentation of this group the difference between the number of generators and the number of relations is less than two.
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.
We describe families of monotone symplectic manifolds constructed via the symplectic cutting procedure of Lerman from the cotangent bundle of manifolds endowed with a free circle action. We also give obstructions to the monotone Lagrangian embedding of some compact manifolds in these symplectic manifolds.
We prove a Chekanov-type theorem for the spherization of the cotangent bundle $ST^*B$ of a closed manifold $B$. It claims that for Legendrian submanifolds in $ST^*B$ the property "to be given by a generating family quadratic at infinity" persists under Legendrian isotopies.
We prove a conjecture of Viterbo about the spectral distance on the space of compact exact Lagrangian submanifolds of a cotangent bundle $T^*M$ in the case where $M$ is a compact homogeneous space: if such a Lagrangian submanifold is contained in the unit ball bundle of $T^*M$, its spectral distance to the zero section is uniformly bounded. This also holds for some immersed Lagrangian submanifolds if we take into account the length of the maximal Reeb chord.
We consider an entropy-type invariant which measures the polynomial volume growth of submanifolds under the iterates of a map, and we establish sharp uniform lower bounds of this invariant for the following classes of symplectomorphisms of cotangent bundles over a compact base: 1) non-identical compactly supported symplectomorphisms which are symplectically isotopic to the identity, 2) symplectomorphisms generated by classical Hamiltonian functions, 3) Dehn twist like symplectomorphisms over compact rank one symmetric spaces.
We show that all Lagrangian submanifolds of the cotangent bundle of a Riemann surface which are homotopic to the zero section must be smoothly isotopic to the zero section.
We construct graph selectors for compact exact Lagrangians in the cotangent bundle of an orientable, closed manifold. The construction combines Lagrangian spectral invariants developed by Oh and results by Abouzaid about the Fukaya category of a cotangent bundle. We also introduce the notion of Lipschitz-exact Lagrangians and prove that these admit an appropriate generalization of graph selector. We then, following Bernard-Oliveira dos Santos, use these results to give a new characterization of the Aubry and Mane sets of a Tonelli Hamiltonian and to generalize a result of Arnaud on Lagrangians…
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…
This paper is essentially made of the three preprints arXiv:1212.5818, arXiv:1311.0187, arXiv:1603.07876 gathered in a single text, with simplified proofs. We recall several results of the microlocal theory of sheaves of Kashiwara-Schapira and apply them to study the symplectic geometry of cotangent bundles. We explain how we can recover the Gromov nonsqueezing theorem, the Gromov-Eliashberg rigidity theorem, the existence of graph selectors, we prove a three cusps conjecture about curves on the sphere and we recover more recent results on the topology of exact Lagrangian submanifolds of cotan…
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 consider a smooth submanifold $N$ with a smooth boundary in an ambient closed manifold $M$ and assign a spectral invariant $c(α,H)$ to every singular homological class $α\in H_*(N)$ and a Hamiltonian $H$ defined on the cotangent bundle $T^*M$. We also derive certain properties of spectral numbers, for example we prove that spectral invariants $c_\pm(H,N)$ associated to the whole Floer homology $HF_*(H,N:M)$ of the submanifold $N$, are limits of the decreasing nested family of open sets.
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 show that, for any two orientable smooth open 4-manifolds $X_0,X_1$ which are homeomorphic, their cotangent bundles $T^*X_0,T^*X_1$ are symplectomorphic with their canonical symplectic structure. In particular, for any smooth manifold $R$ homeomorphic to $\mathbb{R}^4$, the standard Stein structure on $T^*R$ is Stein homotopic to the standard Stein structure on $T^*\mathbb{R}^4 = \mathbb{R}^8$. We use this to show that any exotic $\mathbb{R}^4$ embeds in the standard symplectic $\mathbb{R}^8$ as a Lagrangian submanifold. As a corollary, we show that $\mathbb{R}^8$ has uncountably many smoot…
Given a vector bundle $A\to M$ we study the geometry of the graded manifolds $T^*[k]A[1]$, including their canonical symplectic structures, compatible Q-structures and Lagrangian Q-submanifolds. We relate these graded objects to classical structures, such as higher Courant algebroids on $A\oplus\bigwedge^{k-1}A^*$ and higher Dirac structures therein, semi-direct products of Lie algebroid structures on $A$ with their coadjoint representations up to homotopy, and branes on certain AKSZ $σ$-models.
We introduce an $A_\infty$ map from the cubical chain complex of the based loop space of Lagrangian submanifolds with Legendrian boundary in a Liouville Manifold $C_{*}(Ω_{L} \mathcal{L}\mathit{ag})$ to wrapped Floer cohomology of Lagrangian submanifold $\mathcal{CW}^{-*}(L,L)$. In the case of a cotangent bundle and a Lagrangian co-fiber, the composition of our map with a previously constructed map from $\mathcal{CW}^*(L,L) \to C_{*}(Ω_q Q) $ shows that this map is split surjective.
We investigate the extrinsic topology of Lagrangian submanifolds and of their submanifolds in closed symplectic manifolds using Floer homological methods. The first result asserts that the homology class of a displaceable monotone Lagrangian submanifold vanishes in the homology of the ambient symplectic manifold. Combining this with spectral invariants we provide a new mechanism for proving Lagrangian intersection results e.g. entailing that any two simply connected Lagrangian submanifold in $\CP^n\times\CP^n$ must intersect.
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…
We consider Lagrangian submanifolds lying on a fiberwise strictly convex hypersurface in some cotangent bundle or, respectively, in the domain bounded by such a hypersurface. We establish a new boundary rigidity phenomenon, saying that certain Lagrangians on the hypersurface cannot be deformed (via Lagrangians having the same Liouville class) into the interior domain. Moreover, we study the "non-removable intersection set" between the Lagrangian and the hypersurface, and show that it contains a set with specific dynamical behavior, known as Aubry set in Aubry-Mather theory.
The manifold M being compact and connected, we prove that every submanifold of its cotangent bundle that is Hamiltonianly isotopic to the zero-section and that is invariant by a Tonelli flow is a graph.
We prove a version of the Arnol'd conjecture for Lagrangian submanifolds of conformal symplectic manifolds: a Lagrangian $L$ which has non-zero Morse-Novikov homology for the restriction of the Lee form $β$ cannot be disjoined from itself by a $C^0$-small Hamiltonian isotopy. Furthermore for generic such isotopies the number of intersection points equals at least the sum of the free Betti numbers of the Morse-Novikov homology of $β$. We also give a short exposition of conformal symplectic geometry, aimed at readers who are familiar with (standard) symplectic or contact geometry.
Let n>3, and let L be a Lagrangian embedding of an n-disk into the cotangent bundle of n-dimensional Euclidean space that agrees with the cotangent fiber over a non-zero point x outside a compact set. Assume that L is disjoint from the cotangent fiber at the origin. The projection of L to the base extends to a map of the n-sphere into the complement of the origin in Euclidean n-space . We show that this map is homotopically trivial, answering a question of Y. Eliashberg. We give a number of generalizations of this result, including homotopical constraints on embedded Lagrangian disks in the co…
We construct a Lagrangian submanifold, inside the cotangent bundle of a real torus, which we call a Lagrangian pair of pants. It is given as the graph of the differential of a smooth function defined on the real blow up of a Lagrangian coamoeba. Lagrangian pairs of pants are the main building blocks in a construction of smooth Lagrangian submanifolds of $(\mathbb{C}^*)^n$ which lift tropical subvarieties in $\mathbb{R}^n$. As an example we explain how to lift tropical curves in $\mathbb{R}^2$ to Lagrangian submanifolds of $(\mathbb{C}^*)^2$. We also give several new examples of Lagrangian subm…
Two smooth map germs are right-equivalent if and only if they generate two Lagrangian submanifolds in a cotangent bundle which have the same contact with the zero-section. In this paper we provide a reverse direction to this classical result of Golubitsky and Guillemin. Two Lagrangian submanifolds of a symplectic manifold have the same contact with a third Lagrangian submanifold if and only if the intersection problems correspond to stably right equivalent map germs. We, therefore, obtain a correspondence between local Lagrangian intersection problems and catastrophe theory while the classical…
We consider various constructions of monotone Lagrangian submanifolds of $C P^n, S^2\times S^2$, and quadric hypersurfaces of $C P^n$. In $S^2\times S^2$ and $C P^2$ we show that several different known constructions of exotic monotone tori yield results that are Hamiltonian isotopic to each other, in particular answering a question of Wu by showing that the monotone fiber of a toric degeneration model of $C P^2$ is Hamiltonian isotopic to the Chekanov torus. Generalizing our constructions to higher dimensions leads us to consider monotone Lagrangian submanifolds (typically not tori) of quadri…
Let k>2. We prove that the cotangent bundles of oriented homotopy (2k-1)-spheres S and S' are symplectomorphic only if the classes defined by S and S' agree up to sign in the quotient group of oriented homotopy spheres modulo those which bound parallelizable manifolds. We also show that if the connect sum of real projective space of dimension (4k-1) and a homotopy (4k-1)-sphere admits a Lagrangian embedding in complex projective space, then twice the homotopy sphere framed bounds. The proofs build on previous work of Abouzaid and the authors, in combination with a new cut-and-paste argument, w…
Let L be a D-dimensional submanifold of a 2D-dimensional exact symplectic manifold (M, w) and let f be a symplectic diffeomorphism onf M. In this article, we deal with the link between the dynamics of f restricted to L and the geometry of L (is L Lagrangian, is it smooth, is it a graph...?). We prove different kinds of results. - for D=3, we prove that if a torus that carries some characteristic loop, then either L is Lagrangian or the restricted dynamics g of f to L can not be minimal (i.e. all the orbits are dense) with (g^k) equilipschitz; - for a Tonelli Hamiltonian of the cotangent bundle…
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…
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 show that for $n\geq 2$ there exists an exact Lagrangian submanifold $L$ in the cotangent bundle $T^*\mathbb{T}^n$ of the $n$-dimensional torus $\mathbb{T}^n$ such that $L$ is symplectically but not Hamiltonian isotopic to the zero section of $T^*\mathbb{T}^n$.
Given a symplectic cohomology class of degree 1, we define the notion of an equivariant Lagrangian submanifold. The Floer cohomology of equivariant Lagrangian submanifolds has a natural endomorphism, which induces a grading by generalized eigenspaces. Taking Euler characteristics with respect to the induced grading yields a deformation of the intersection number. Dehn twists act naturally on equivariant Lagrangians. Cotangent bundles and Lefschetz fibrations give fully computable examples. A key step in computations is to impose the "dilation" condition stipulating that the BV operator applied…
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 construct using relatively basic techniques a spectral sequence for exact Lagrangians in cotangent bundles similar to the one constructed by Fukaya, Seidel, and Smith. That spectral sequence was used to prove that exact relative spin Lagrangians in simply connected cotangent bundles with vanishing Maslov class are homology equivalent to the base (a similar result was also obtained by Nadler). The ideas in that paper were extended by Abouzaid who proved that vanishing Maslov class alone implies homotopy equivalence. In this paper we present a short proof of the fact that any exact Lagrangian…
We prove that the inclusion of every closed exact Lagrangian with vanishing Maslov class in a cotangent bundle is a homotopy equivalence. We start by adapting an idea of Fukaya-Seidel-Smith to prove that such a Lagrangian is equivalent to the zero section in the Fukaya category with integral coefficients. We then study an extension of the Fukaya category in which Lagrangians equipped with local systems of arbitrary dimension are admitted as objects, and prove that this extension is generated, in the appropriate sense, by local systems over a cotangent fibre. Whenever the cotangent bundle is si…
We prove that the only exact Lagrangian submanifolds in an ALE space are spheres. ALE spaces are the simply connected hyperkahler manifolds which at infinity look like C^2/G for any finite subgroup G of SL(2,C). They can be realized as the plumbing of copies of the cotangent bundle of a 2-sphere according to ADE Dynkin diagrams. The proof relies on symplectic cohomology.
It is well known that for any exotic pair of simply connected closed oriented 4-manifolds, one is obtained from the other by twisting a compact contractible submanifold via an involution on the boundary. By contrast, here we show that for each positive integer $n$, there exists a simply connected closed oriented 4-manifold $X$ such that, for any compact (not necessarily connected) codimension zero submanifold $W$ with $b_1(\partial W)<n$, the set of all smooth structures on $X$ cannot be generated from $X$ by twisting $W$ and varying the gluing map. As a corollary, we show that there exists no…
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…
