Non-existence of global transverse Poincaré sections (Q2032668)

Consider a flow defined on a closed manifold \(Z\). A compact embedded hypersurface \(\Sigma \subset Z\) is called a {global transverse Poincaré section} if the flow is everywhere transverse to \(\Sigma\), and if it intersects \(\Sigma\) by flowing along each orbit forward or backward. The paper deals with the obstruction to the existence of such sections for Hamiltonian systems, i.e., in the case of a symplectic manifold \((M,\omega)\) in which \(Z=H^{-1}(c)\) is a fixed level set for some Hamiltonian function \(H\). A first result (Proposition 2.1) shows that if \(\Sigma\) is a global transverse Poincaré section of \(Z=H^{-1}(c)\), then \(\Sigma\) is a symplectic submanifold of \((M,\omega)\). In particular, this implies that no such section exists if \(\omega\) is exact. A second result (Proposition 3.1) shows that the level set \(Z=H^{-1}(c)\) must be equipped with a structure of cosymplectic manifold if it admits a global transverse Poincaré section. Moreover, any cosymplectic manifold can be obtained in that way by constructing a suitable triple \((M,\omega,H)\) (Proposition 4.1). Finally, Theorem 5.2 states that when the cosymplectic manifold structure on \(Z=H^{-1}(c)\) is induced by the symplectic structure \(\omega\) on \(M\), and if additionally \(Z\) is regular connected, then there exists a global transverse Poincaré section for the Hamiltonian flow of \(H\) on \(Z\).