Relative singular value decomposition and applications to LS-category (Q2332373)

The Lusternik-Schnirelmann (LS) category of a topological space \(X\), denoted \(\mathrm{cat}(X)\), is a homotopy invariant which is of importance in areas such as dynamical systems and symplectic geometry. But it is also very difficult to compute in general. An interesting problem is to calculate the LS-category of Lie groups. Particularly for \(\mathrm{Sp}(k)\) very little is known. In this paper the authors use a singular value decomposition of \(P\in \mathrm{Sp}(k)\) to calculate \(\mathrm{Sp}(k)\) for low values of \(k\), and for larger values present a conjectural lower bound in terms of a relative LS-category, using the embedding of \(\mathrm{Sp}(k)\) into the Stiefel manifold \(X_{n,k}\).