Topological contact dynamics. III: Uniqueness of the topological Hamiltonian and \(C^0\)-rigidity of the geodesic flow (Q307989)

The first part of the paper (Sections 2 and 3) contains background material and the proof of the first result of this paper (Theorem 1.1). Section 4 provides proofs of local versions of the theorems in the introduction. The final part of the paper (Sections 5 and 6) concerns applications of the uniqueness theorems to smooth and topological contact dynamics, and topological rigidity of geodesic flows of Riemannian manifolds. More precisely, the authors prove that a topological contact isotopy uniquely defines a topological contact Hamiltonian. Combined with previous results of the authors [Adv. Geom. 15, No. 3, 349--380 (2015; Zbl 1334.53083)], this generalizes the classical one-to-one correspondence between smooth contact isotopies and their generating smooth contact Hamiltonians and conformal factors to the group of topological contact dynamical systems. Applications of this generalized correspondence include \(\mathcal{C}^0\)-rigidity of smooth contact Hamiltonians, a transformation law for topological contact dynamical systems, and \(\mathcal{C}^0\)-rigidity of the geodesic flows of Riemannian manifolds.