Causal holography of traversing flows (Q2225497)

The author studies non-vanishing gradient-like vector fields on compact manifolds with boundary, and more particularly the behavior of the flow trajectories at the boundary of the manifold. The vector field is said to be traversing if each trajectory is homeomorphic either to a closed interval or to a singleton. The author uses semi-algebraic models in the study of the trajectory space of such vector fields. This space admits a natural stratification. He shows that the trajectory space admits in some precise sense a singular smooth structure. He proves that the trajectory space of a transversely generic vector field is a Whitney stratified space and in particular is triangulable. He then addresses the following question: given a traversing vector field \(v\) on a compact connected manifold \(X\), what kind of residual structure on \(\partial X\) allows for a reconstruction of the pair \((X,v)\), up to homeomorphism or diffeomorphism? Such a structure, if it exists, is called holographic. A causality map of the boundary is introduced for the aim of studying this question, which is an analogue of the classical Poincaré first return map, and the author proves a result which says, roughly speaking, that for a traversing boundary generic vector field, the causality map allows the reconstruction of the manifold equipped with the 1-dimensional foliation induced by the vector field. The paper includes some applications to geodesic flows on compact manifolds with boundary. The author also mentions relations with classical inverse scattering problems and geodesic billiards.