In this paper we first show that the necessary condition introduced in our previous paper is also a sufficient condition for a path to be a geodesic in the group $\Ham^c(M)$ of compactly supported Hamiltonian symplectomorphisms. This applies with no restriction on $M$. We then discuss conditions which guarantee that such a path minimizes the Hofer length. Our argument relies on a general geometric construction (the gluing of monodromies) and on an extension of Gromov's non-squeezing theorem both to more general manifolds and to more general capacities. The manifolds we consider are quasi-cylinders, that is spaces homeomorphic to $M \times D^2$ which are symplectically ruled over $D^2$. When we work with the usual capacity (derived from embedded balls), we can prove the existence of paths which minimize the length among all homotopic paths, provided that $M$ is semi-monotone. (This restriction occurs because of the well-known difficulty with the theory of $J$-holomorphic curves in arbitrary $M$.) However, we can only prove the existence of length-minimizing paths (i.e. paths which minimize length amongst {\it all} paths, not only the homotopic ones) under even more restrictive conditions on $M$, for example when $M$ is exact and convex or of dimension $2$. The new difficulty is caused by the possibility that there are non-trivial and very short loops in $\Ham^c(M)$. When such length-minimizing paths do exist, we can extend the Bialy--Polterovich calculation of the Hofer norm on a neighbourhood of the identity ($C^1$-flatness).
Consider the group $\Ham^c(M)$ of compactly supported Hamiltonian symplectomorphisms of the symplectic manifold $(M,\om)$ with the Hofer $L^{\infty}$-norm. A path in $\Ham^c(M)$ will be called a geodesic if all sufficiently short pieces of it are local minima for the Hofer length functional $\Ll$. In this paper, we give a necessary condition for a path $\ga$ to be a geodesic. We also develop a necessary condition for a geodesic to be stable, that is, a local minimum for $\Ll$. This condition is related to the existence of periodic orbits for the linearization of the path, and so extends Ustilo…
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.
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 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 …
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…
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…
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…
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…
We use Floer homology to study the Hofer-Zehnder capacity of neighborhoods near a closed symplectic submanifold M of a geometrically bounded and symplectically aspherical ambient manifold. We prove that, when the unit normal bundle of M is homologically trivial in degree dim(M) (for example, if codim(M) > dim(M)), a refined version of the Hofer-Zehnder capacity is finite for all open sets close enough to M. We compute this capacity for certain tubular neighborhoods of M by using a squeezing argument in which the algebraic framework of Floer theory is used to detect nontrivial periodic orbits. …
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.
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…
We study lower semi-continuity properties of the volume, i.e., the surface area, of a closed Lagrangian manifold with respect to the Hofer- and $γ$-distance on a class of monotone Lagrangian submanifolds Hamiltonian isotopic to each other. We prove that volume is $γ$-lower semi-continuous in two cases. In the first one the volume form comes from a Kähler metric with a large group of Hamiltonian isometries, but there are no additional constraints on the Lagrangian submanifold. The second one is when the volume is taken with respect to any compatible metric, but the Lagrangian submanifold must b…
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 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…
The paper provides a link between ergodic theory and symplectic topology. A classical notion of ergodic theory is a skew product map associated with a loop in a group of transformations. We study skew products which come from loops in the group of Hamiltonian diffeomorphisms of a symplectic manifold. Our main question is which homotopy classes of loops can be represented by strictly ergodic skew products. We prove an existence result, and find an obstruction which arises from Hofer's geometry on the group of Hamiltonian diffeomorphisms.
In this paper, we study the dynamical aspects of the \emph{Hamiltonian homeomorphism group} $Hameo(M,ω)$ which was introduced by Müller and the author. We introduce the notion of autonomous continuous Hamiltonian flows and extend the well-known conservation of energy to such flows. The definitions of the Hofer length and of the spectral invariants $ρ_a$ are extended to continuous Hamiltonian paths, and the Hofer norm and the spectral norm $γ:Ham(M,ω) \to \R_+$ are generalized to the corresponding intrinsic norms on $Hameo(M,ω)$ respectively. Using these extensions, we also extend the construct…
We show that the Hamiltonian action satisfies the Palais-Smale condition over a "mixed regularity" space of loops in cotangent bundles, namely the space of loops with regularity $H^s$, $s\in (\frac 12, 1)$, in the base and $H^{1-s}$ in the fiber direction. As an application, we give a simplified proof of a theorem of Hofer-Viterbo on the existence of closed characteristic leaves for certain contact type hypersufaces in cotangent bundles.
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-twiste…
The main result in this paper is the $C^{\infty}$ closing lemma for a large family of Hamiltonian flows on $4$-dimensional symplectic manifolds, which includes classical Hamiltonian systems. First we prove the $C^{\infty}$ closing lemma and the $C^r$ general density theorem for geodesic flows on closed Finsler surfaces by combining a result of Asaoka-Irie with the dual lens map technique. Then we extend our results to Hamitonian flows with certain restriction. We also list some applications of our results in differential geometry and contact topology.
In the present paper, we consider a smooth $C^\infty$ symplectic classification of Lagrangian fibrations near cusp singularities, parabolic orbits and cuspidal tori. We show that for these singularities as well as for an arrangement of singularities known as a flap, which arises in the integrable subcritical Hamiltonian Hopf bifurcation, the action variables form a complete set of $C^\infty$ symplectic invariants. We also give a symplectic classification for parabolic orbits in the real-analytic case. Namely, we prove that a complete symplectic invariant in this case is given by a real-analyti…
The Hamiltonian flow of the standard metric Hamiltonian with respect to the twisted symplectic structure on the cotangent bundle describes the motion of a charged particle on the base. We prove that under certain natural hypotheses the number of periodic orbits on low energy levels for this flow is at least the sum of Betti numbers of the base. The problem is closely related to the existence question for periodic orbits on energy levels of a proper Hamiltonian near a Morse-Bott non-degenerate minimum. In this case, when some extra requirements are met, we also give a lower bound for the number…
A long-standing conjecture in Hamiltonian Dynamics states that the Reeb flow of any convex hypersurface in $\mathbb{R}^{2n}$ carries an elliptic closed orbit. Two important contributions toward its proof were given by Ekeland in 1986 and Dell'Antonio-D'Onofrio-Ekeland in 1995 proving this for convex hypersurfaces satisfying suitable pinching conditions and for antipodal invariant convex hypersurfaces respectively. In this work we present a generalization of these results using contact homology and a notion of dynamical convexity first introduced by Hofer-Wysocki-Zehnder for tight contact forms…
We prove a $C^\infty$ closing lemma for Hamiltonian diffeomorphisms of closed surfaces. This is a consequence of a $C^\infty$ closing lemma for Reeb flows on closed contact three-manifolds, which was recently proved as an application of spectral invariants in embedded contact homology. A key new ingredient of this paper is an analysis of an area-preserving map near its fixed point, which is based on some classical results in Hamiltonian dynamics: existence of KAM invariant circles for elliptic fixed points, and convergence of the Birkhoff normal form for hyperbolic fixed points.
Here we prove that for each Hamiltonian function $H\in \mathcal{C}^\infty(\mathbb{R}^4, \mathbb{R})$ defined on the standard symplectic $(\mathbb{R}^4, ω_0)$, for which $M:=H^{-1}(0)$ is a non-empty compact regular energy level, the Hamiltonian flow on $M$ is not minimal. That is, we prove there exists a closed invariant subset of the Hamiltonian flow in $M$ that is neither $\emptyset$ nor all of $M$. This answers the four dimensional case of a twenty year old question of Michel Herman, part of which can be regarded as a special case of the Gottschalk Conjecture. Our principal technique is the…
This paper is withdrawn by the author due to a critical error in the proof of the main theorem, Theorem 3.10. (More specifically the identity (5.18) is incorrect in that the $T^*S^1(2)$-factor is missing in the right hand side of the equality.) Therefore the uniquenss question for $L^{(1,\infty)}$-case is still open.
In this paper, we prove the existence of infinitely many homoclinic orbits for the first order Hamiltonian systems $J\dot{x}-M(t)x+ R'(t,x)=0$, by the minimax methods in critical point theory, when $R(t,y)$ satisfies the superquadratic condition ${{R(t,x)}\over{\|x\r|^{2}}}\longrightarrow \pm\infty$ as $\|x\|\longrightarrow\infty$, uniformly in $t$, and need not satisfy the global Ambrosetti-Rabinowitz condition
