Holomorphic disks and the disk potential for a fibered Lagrangian (Q2022198)

The paper under review is part of a series of works by the author in which he develops computational tools for Floer cohomology of ``fibred Lagrangian submanifolds''. Roughly speaking, a fibred Lagrangian submanifold is a submanifold \(L\) of the total space of a symplectic fibration \(\pi\colon E\to B\) such that \(\pi|_L\) is itself a fibration (I will be more precise below). The author computes the dominant terms in the potential function for a fibred Lagrangian submanifold, which turn out to come from low-energy pearly trajectories in the fibre and and (explicit) lifts of low-energy trajectories in the base. He shows that this is enough to determine the behaviour of Floer cohomology. He works out the consequences in a number of examples in Section 9. \textbf{Background:} Floer cohomology is an algebra associated to a Lagrangian submanifold of a symplectic manifold under the assumption that the Lagrangian is ``unobstructed''. A Lagrangian \(L\) has nonzero Floer cohomology (over the Novikov field) means that one cannot displace \(L\) from itself by a Hamiltonian isotopy. More generally, one can decorate \(L\) with the extra data of a local system and use this to twist the Floer differential; if the local system is ``unobstructed'' this gives an invariant Floer cohomology algebra which can also detect nondisplaceability. One powerful way of finding local systems with unobstructed, nonzero Floer cohomology is to understand the ``potential function'' of a Lagrangian submanifold. Roughly speaking, this is a function on the space of local systems, whose derivative is related to the Floer differential on 1-cochains. Critical points of the potential correspond to local systems with nontrivial \(HF^1\), and the Hessian encodes information about the product structure on Floer cohomology. This was introduced by \textit{K. Fukaya} et al. [Lagrangian intersection Floer theory. Anomaly and obstruction. I. Providence, RI: American Mathematical Society (AMS); Somerville, MA: International Press (2009; Zbl 1181.53002)] and has been used by them and many other authors since. \textbf{In detail:} For technical reasons (as ever in Floer theory), the author restricts to Lagrangians which satisfy some additional hypotheses: \begin{itemize} \item[\(\bullet\)] The bundle \(\pi|_L\colon L\to L_B\) should be trivial, that is \(L\cong L_F\times L_B\) for some Lagrangian \(L_F\) in the fibre. \item[\(\bullet\)] The fibre Lagrangian \(L_F\) should be monotone, spin and minimal Maslov at least 2. \item[\(\bullet\)] The base Lagrangian \(L_B\) should be rational (symplectic areas of discs with boundary on \(L_B\) should be rational). \end{itemize} Similar fibred geometric situations have been considered by many authors before, both for ``open string'' invariants like Lagrangian Floer cohomology and for ``closed string'' invariants like quantum cohomology or symplectic cohomology, but this is the first time I am aware of where the fibration structure has been used in a serious way to get at the potential function. In his earlier work [``A Leray-Serre spectral sequence for Lagrangian Floer theory'', Preprint, \url{arXiv:1701.07788}], the author has established a Leray-Serre-like spectral sequence computing the Floer cohomology of an unobstructed Lagrangian satisfying these conditions. This had somewhat limited practical use because (a) it did not give a way of detecting unobstructedness, (b) the differentials on the higher pages of the spectral sequence were usually inaccessible. In the paper under review, he imposes some further restrictions on the fibration, but is able to give information about the potential function. The additional assumptions are that the fibre is Kähler, with Kähler isometry group \(G\), and that the holonomies of the symplectic connection belong to this isometry group. It is worth noting that, while these geometric assumptions are strong, they are not unreasonably strong, and hold in a wide array of interesting and nontrivial examples (as illustrated by Section 9). The author's main contribution in this paper is to show that, in a suitable sense, the lowest-order contributions to the potential of a fibred Lagrangian come from (explicit) lifts of low-energy contributions in the base plus low-energy contributions in the fibre. In particular, if the fibre Lagrangian is monotone and the base Lagrangian is unobstructed, he is able to produce unobstructed local systems on the total space and compute the Floer cohomology. This is stated more precisely in Theorem 1.2 (restated in Theorem 7.1). The technical heart of the paper is Section 5, where he explains how to construct regular lifts of pearly trajectories in the base to the total space. This is where he makes heavy use of the assumptions on holonomy and the fibrewise Kähler metric. A more ``applicable'' repackaging of the main theorem is given in Theorem 8.1, which is what he appeals to in all of the later applications. This repackaging asserts that if the ``second-order potential'' (i.e., the truncated potential that only takes into account the aforementioned discs) has a nondegenerate critical point and the cohomology of the fibred Lagrangian is generated by \(H^1\) then the Floer cohomology for the corresponding local system is isomorphic to the ordinary cohomology (with Novikov coefficients). Since the second-order potential is significantly easier to compute than the full potential, this is a very useful observation. To demonstrate its utility, he gives some nice examples (Section 9.2) of \(n\)-parameter families of pairwise-disjoint nondisplaceable Lagrangian tori in the total spaces of many holomorphic \(\mathbb{CP}^k\)-bundles over \(\mathbb{CP}^n\). He also has examples of Lagrangian tori in certain flag and partial-flag manifolds whose Floer cohomology he computes and finds to be non-zero (Sections 9.1 and 9.3). By contrast, the results from his earlier papers on fibred Lagrangians were mostly about \textit{vanishing} of Floer cohomology (which was easier to prove using the spectral sequence) rather than non-vanishing.