Symplectic topology in the nineties (Q1295462)

This is a very interesting, although necessarily incomplete survey, of the new developments of symplectic topology in the last decade written by one of the leading scholars in this area. The first section introduces the reader to symplectic and contact manifolds, Hamiltonian dynamics and the (now classical) symplectic rigidity results obtained using Gromov theory of pseudo-holomorphic curves. Section two deals with the classification of the tight and overtwisted structures on compact 3-manifolds. Section 3 reviews Hofer metric and the results by McDuff, Lalonde and others on energy displacement inequality. The next section presents a new method for constructing codimension-two symplectic submanifolds of a symplectic manifold discovered recently by S. Donaldson. These arise as zero sets of sections of complex line bundles that are only ``approximately holomorphic'' in a very definite sense. Section five contains a very short survey of the existence results for pseudo-holomorphic curves in a given homology class on symplectic 4-manifolds. Most of them are corollaries of the Taubes' discovery of the relationship between Seiberg-Witten invariants and the number of pseudo-holomorphic curves counted with appropriate multiplicities. Section seven contains a presentation of the method of generating families. In the eighties this method was successfully used by Chaperon, Sikorav and Laudenbach as a finite dimensional approach to the Arnold conjecture, alternative to then popular elliptic methods of Gromov and Floer. Later, this method was taken to a higher level of sophistication by Viterbo and his collaborators. They derived symplectic capacities and gave (in a special case) a construction of Floer homology groups based on generating families. On the contact side the method was studied by Chekanov and was also used by A. Givental in his construction of a nonlinear Maslov index. The presentation here (based on a joint paper of Eliashberg and Gromov) unifies part of the previous work using the direct image construction which assigns to any smooth map \(h:M\to N\) and any function \(f\) on \(M\) the Lagrangian submanifold of \(T*(N)\) obtained as the symplectic reduction of the graph of \(df\) with respect to the fiber normal to \(h\). The main result states that the map induced by the direct image construction from the space of functions that are fibrations at infinity to the space of exact Lagrangian embeddings of a given manifold fixed at infinity becomes Serre fibration after suspensions. There is a parallel version of this for contact manifolds as well. The last two sections, followed by an extensive reference list, are devoted to problems and recent developments.