Volume growth in the component of the Dehn-Seidel twist (Q2571744)

The paper addresses a question of Polterovich concerning the slow growth of certain compactly supported symplectomorphisms outside the identity component of the group of compactly supported smooth symplectomorphisms of \((T^{*} B , d \lambda)\) [\textit{L. Polterovich}, Invent. Math. 150, 655--686 (2002; Zbl 1036.53064) and in: Eliashberg, Yakov (ed.) et al., Symplectic and contact topology: Interactions and perspectives. Papers of the workshop on symplectic and contact topology, quantum cohomology, and symplectic field theory, Montreal and Toronto, Canada, March-April 2001. Providence, RI: American Mathematical Society (AMS). Fields Inst. Commun. 35, 165--173 (2003; Zbl 1070.37035)]. The spaces under consideration are the cotangent bundels \((T^* B, d \lambda)\) over \(d\)-dimensional compact rank 1 symmetric spaces \(B\), and the relevant diffeomorphisms \(\phi\) are Dehn-twist-like symplectomorphisms (here, \(d \lambda\) refers to the canonical symplectic structure). For this setting, the author compares the following two entropy-like invariants \[ h_i (\phi):= \sup_{\sigma \in \Sigma_i} \liminf_{n \to \infty} \frac{\log \mu_g (\phi^n(\sigma))}{\log n} \text{ for } i=1,2, \] where \(\Sigma_1\) refers to the set of smooth embeddings \(\sigma\) of the \(d\)-dimensional unit cube \([0,1]^d\) in \(B\), whereas \(\Sigma_2\) refers to the set of all smooth embeddings \(\sigma: [0,1]^d \to T^{*} B\) whose image is a Lagrangian submanifold (i.e., \(d \lambda\) vanishes on the image). In a nut shell, the main result of the paper is to show \[ h_1(\phi) \geq h_2(\phi) \geq 1. \]