Flows in Flatland: a romance of few dimensions (Q1707597)

This paper deals with solutions of ODE's on compact surfaces with boundary. Each such ODE on a surface \(X\) is represented by a smooth vector field \(v\) with global potential \(f: X \rightarrow \mathbb{R}\) such that \(df(v)>0\) at all points away from singularities of \(v\), \(v(x)=0\). The paper contains ten sections. The introduction gives an overview of some questions that motivated the presented results and an illustrative sample of these results. The authors states that the strongest results in the paper deal with traversing vector fields. These are vector fields that are gradients of smooth functions with no critical points. A precise definition reads as follows: a nonvanishing vector field \(v\) on a compact surface \(X\) is traversing if all its trajectories are closed segments or singletons, and the end of the segments as well as the singletons belong to the boundary of \(X\). The main results are the following two theorems: a) Theorem. Let a surface \(X\) be formed by removing \(k\) open discs from a closed orientable surface \(Y\), the sphere with \(g\) handles. Then, for an open and dense set in the space of all traversing vector fields \(v\) on \(X\), the number of concave \(v\)-flow tangencies to \(\partial X\) is greater or equal to \(4g-4+2k\). Moreover, this inequality turns into an equality if and only if the trajectories of \(v\) are tangent to \(\partial X\) in a concave manner. The following theorem, consisting of three statements, gives a complete characterization of all compact connected surfaces with boundary that support traversing vector fields having only concave/convex tangencies. b) Theorem. 1) Any connected compact surface \(X\) with boundary, different from the disk and the Möbius band, admits a traversing vector field \(v\) with only concave tangency points to \(\partial X\). 2) The disk and the Mobius band do not admit any such vector field. 3) Any connected compact surface with boundary, that admits a traversing vector field with convex tangency points only, is a disk or an annulus. The annulus is the only connected compact surface that admits both concave and convex traversing vector fields. Section 2 presents an approach to the Morse theory of gradient flows. Section 3 deals with vector fields and the Morse stratification on surfaces. Section 4 starts with a definition of boundary convex and boundary concave vector fields and proves several results on their existence. Section 5 deals with spaces of vector fields. Section 6 presents a graph-theoretical approach to the concavity of traversing vector fields in 2D. Section 7 is entitled combinatorics of tangency for traversing flows in 2D and in Section 8 the author proves the casual holography principle in 2D and derives a few corollaries from it. Section 9 deals with convex envelops and characteristic classes of traversing flows. The last section gives an overview on a possible extension to dimension three.