Homotopy equivalence of nearby Lagrangians and the Serre spectral sequence (Q2402829)

Let \(N\) be a compact connected manifold without boundary and \(L\subset T^*N\) be an exact Lagrangian submanifold, also compact without boundary. The main result is that if \(L\) has a vanishing Maslov class then \(L\to N\) is a homology equivalence that induces an isomorphism of fundamental groups (if \(\pi_1(N)\) is pro-finite it is also a homotopy equivalence). The paper's approach simplifies the approach of Fukaya-Seidel-Smith, who constructed a spectral sequence converging to the fiberwise Lagrangian intersection Floer homology of \(L\) with itself. A similar result was obtained by Nadler, and was later strengthened by Abouzaid to a homotopy equivalence, but all these proofs are much more technical. The paper uses a Morse-theoretic construction of the spectral sequence, which for self-indexing Morse functions looks much like the Serre spectral sequence. Given a Morse function \(g:N\to\mathbb{R}\), two large scale perturbations \(K_t=tL\) and \(L_t=tL+dg\), are defined. The intersection points of \(K_t\) and \(L_t\) ``bunch'' around the critical points of \(g\). An action filtration is considered in which there is a non-trivial filtration level for each critical value of \(g\) containing all the intersection points in all the bunches with the values close to the critical one. The most technical part is the proof that the bunches at each filtration level do not interact in the differential, hence restricting the differential to any bunch is well defined and produces the same homology groups up to shifting by the Morse index of the associated critical points of \(g\). The bunching construction is used to create a local system on \(N\) of vector spaces over some field \(\mathbb{F}\) (with a relative pin structure when needed). When \(g\) is self-indexing page 1 is identified with the Morse homology complex of \(g\), and page 2 is similar to the Serre spectral sequence. The final piece is to prove a fiberwise version of the Poincaré duality for \(L\to N\) . The fibers represent the relative difference, and thereby behave homologically like \(0\)-dimensional manifolds.