Equivariant symplectic homology of Anosov contact structures (Q1928349)

This beautiful little paper must be seen to be appreciated. An Anosov flow is a flow which admits an invariant splitting of tangent spaces into stable and unstable subbundles on which the linearized flow is (respectively) exponentially shrinking and exponentially dilating. For instance, the geodesic flow of a negatively curved metric is Anosov. The paper under review investigates the constraints placed on a contact manifold by the requirement that it admits a contact form with Anosov Reeb flow. In this case, the invariant subbundles are Lagrangian subbundles of the contact distribution. The main technical input is Proposition 3.1 which computes the parity of the Conley-Zehnder index of a closed Reeb orbit under the assumption that the (nondegenerate) Reeb flow admits an invariant continuous Lagrangian subbundle. This takes half a page. From there, many beautiful consequences are drawn. For instance, the equivariant symplectic homology of a filling of a contact manifold is graded by the Conley-Zehnder index. Since the differential in equivariant symplectic homology changes degree by one, Proposition 3.1 implies that the differential vanishes in the presence of an invariant Lagrangian subbundle. For the standard four-ball, Proposition 3.1 implies that, for a nondegenerate Anosov Reeb flow (or Reeb flow with invariant Lagrangian subbundle), these indices would be even. However, the equivariant symplectic homology of the ball is known to be supported in odd degrees. Therefore there can be no nondegenerate Anosov Reeb flow on the tight three-sphere. Using the vanishing of the differential and known results about the growth rate for periodic orbits in Anosov flows [\textit{R. Bowen}, Am. J. Math. 94, 1--30 (1972; Zbl 0254.58005)], the authors also deduce obstructions to the existence of Anosov Reeb flows from computations of the growth rate in equivariant symplectic homology. One could also view these as abundance theorems for periodic orbits of Anosov Reeb flows.