Singular fibers of the bending flows on the moduli space of 3D polygons (Q1625187)

The theory of integrable Hamiltonian systems has deserved a lot of attention for many years. In particular, the geometry near regular fibers of the associated Lagrangian foliation has been extensively studied. But the geometry near singular fibers is not so simple. In fact, most singularities of several relevant integrable Hamiltonian systems are the nondegenerate singular fibers, for which there is a topological description. On the other hand, the degenerate singularities of integrable Hamiltonian systems can be much more complicated; for instance, they are not immersed submanifolds in general. However, there is a particular class of integrable Hamiltonian systems whose singular fibers, even the degenerate ones, still look very nice: they are all isotropic homogeneous submanifolds (or more generally isotropic orbispaces). This class of singularities might be called spherical singularities. In this paper, the authors study another family of integrable Hamiltonian systems with spherical singularities: the so-called bending flows introduced by \textit{M. Kapovich} and \textit{J. J. Millson} [J. Differ. Geom. 44, No. 3, 479--513 (1996; Zbl 0889.58017)] on the moduli space \(\mathcal{M}_r\) of \(3D\) polygons with fixed side lengths \(r= (r_1,\dots,r_n)\), which happens to be a manifold when \(r\) is generic. The authors prove that the singular fibers are isotropic homogeneous submanifolds (or isotropic orbispaces).