Fragility and persistence of leafwise intersections (Q2516481)

The paper of the authors is concerned with the study of leafwise intersections -- intersection points of a coisotropic submanifold in a symplectic manifold with its image under a Hamiltonian diffeomorphism, so that the intersection point and its preimage lie on the same leaf of the characteristic foliation on the submanifold. The question of finding lower bounds on the number of leafwise intersections is rooted in applications to Hamiltonian mechanics, in particular the \(n\)-body problem, and has been studied by many authors, starting with the classical methods of J. Moser and more recently using the theory of pseudoholomorphic curves (results due to H. Hofer, P. Albers, U. Frauenfelder, F. Ziltener and some of the author's previous papers). The current article provides an explicit construction which demonstrates some of the limits of previously known results on the existence of leafwise intersections: A closed hypersurface in \(\mathbb{R}^{2n}\) is depicted which exhibits no leafwise intersections for a sequence of Hamiltonians converging to zero in the \(C^{0}\)-norm. The construction relies on the application of methods previously developed by the first author. More specifically, the two leafwise intersections of the unit sphere under a simple explicit Hamiltonian diffeomorphism are destroyed using the technique of inserting a `plug': deforming the sphere along the circle which contains the two leafwise intersection points in order to move them away from the characteristic leaves of their preimages under the diffeomorphism. In a second step, a Moser's trick type argument is used to exhibit these deformed spheres to be the images under \(C^{0}\)-small Hamiltonians of a fixed one. The example provided by the resulting construction in fact also provides an instance of fragility of the characteristic foliation under \(C^{0}\)-deformations, as formulated in the second theorem of the article. The introduction to the paper contains a detailed overview on the subject of leafwise intersections. The main construction is explained comprehensively and its presentation is concise.