Characterization of toric systems via transport costs (Q2220267)

The author investigates completely integrable Hamiltonian systems that induce effective torus actions. Delzant's symplectic classification of completely integrable systems on compact manifolds in [\textit{T. Delzant}, Bull. Soc. Math. Fr. 116, No. 3, 315--339 (1988; Zbl 0676.58029)] describes those that induce effective Hamiltonian torus actions, called compact toric actions. The invariant that characterizes a toric system is the image of its momentum map. This is a convex polytope, and this class of convex polytopes represents all possible compact toric systems up to equivariant symplectomorphism. Consequently a toric system is determined by a finite set of data given by its momentum polytope. This paper presents a characterization of toric systems using transport costs. Transport costs measure how toric or non-toric a system is. Toric systems on \(2n\)-dimensional manifolds are those systems that have zero transport costs with respect to the time-\(T\) map, where \(T \in \mathbb{R}^n\) is the period of the acting \(n\)-torus. The setting is as follows. \((M, \omega)\) is a \(2n\)-dimensional compact symplectic manifold with momentum map \(h = (h_1, h_2, \dots, h_n) : M \rightarrow \mathbb{R}^n\) and \(\varphi^h : \mathbb{R} \times M \rightarrow M\) is the flow associated with \(h\). A system is then called toric if the action generated by the flow \(\varphi^h\) is an effective \(\mathbb{T}^n\)-action and \(2\pi\) is the minimum common period of the \(n\) Hamiltonian circle actions induced by \(h_1, \dots, h_n : M \rightarrow \mathbb{R}\). The author's main result uses a cost functional \(C^h_t (U, c) = \int_U c(x, \varphi_t^h (x)) \,d\mu_\omega\), where \(c: M \times M \rightarrow \mathbb{R}^+\) is a continuous metric-like cost function, \(U \subseteq M \) is open, and \(d \mu_\omega\) is the measure associated with the volume form \(\omega^n\). The \(T\)-periodicity cost of \((M,\omega,h)\) with respect to the cost function \(c\) is \(C_T^h (M,c)\). The main result is then that \((M,\omega,h)\) is toric if and only if \(C^h_{(2\pi, \dots, 2\pi)}(M,c) = 0\) and \(C_s^h (M,c) > 0\) for all \(s \in \mathbb{R}^n\) except for \(\{2\pi k, \dots, 2\pi k\}\) where \(k\) is an integer.