Hofer geometry and cotangent fibers (Q462181)

The paper is concerned with the study of the symplectic geometry of the cotangent bundle of a compact manifold endowed with the standard symplectic structure. The author investigates the group of Hamiltonian diffeomorphisms of this symplectic manifold with the Hofer bi-invariant metric. One of the questions is whether this metric is bounded or unbounded. It is known that in some particular cases it is unbounded [\textit{D. McDuff}, Comment. Math. Helv. 85, No. 1, 95--133 (2010; Zbl 1222.53092); \textit{M. Usher}, Ann. Sci. Éc. Norm. Supér. (4) 46, No. 1, 57--128 (2013; Zbl 1271.53076)]. In the case of the cotangent bundle, the unboundedness of the Hofer metric can be derived from results of \textit{Y.-G. Oh} [J. Differ. Geom. 46, No. 3, 499--577 (1997; Zbl 0926.53031)]. The author studies the slightly more general question of the existence of infinite-rank subgroups. The main result, Theorem 1.1, asserts that for any neighborhood \(U\) of the zero section \(0_N \subset T^*N\) there is a homomorphism \(\Phi :\mathbb R^{\infty} \rightarrow\mathrm{Ham}(T^*N, d\hat{\theta})\) such that every diffeomorphism \(\Phi (a)\) has support contained in \(U\setminus 0_N\) and such that, for all \(a,b \in\mathbb R^{\infty}\) \[ | a-b |_{\infty} \leq d(\Phi (a) - \Phi (b) ) \leq\mathrm{osc} (a-b) . \] The assumptions are quite technical and involve the properties of a Riemannian structure of the manifold \(N\). As the author points out, they are satisfied in many important cases: \((N,g)\) is a compact manifold of nonpositive sectional curvarture, some positively-curved symmetric spaces, e.g., compact semisimple Lie groups and quaternionic Grassmannians, all products \(N\times M\) where is \(N\) a compact manifold satisfying the assumptions of the theorem and \(M\) is any manifold. The paper consists of four sections. The introduction is divided into 4 parts. First, the author explains the problem tackled in the paper, and formulates the main result. The theorem follows easily from a more general technical theorem (1.2). The second part contains references to other papers in which the Hofer metric on \(\mathrm{Ham}(T^\ast N, d\hat{\theta})\) has been studied. The third part presents a summary of the proof. The last part delineates the structure of the paper. In Section 2 the author introduces the key concept of the Floer complex associated to a Hamiltonian function and a pair of suitable noncompact Lagrangian submanifolds of a Liouville manifold. Corollary 2.4 relates the boundary depth associated to this complex to Hofer geometry. In the following section the general results are specified to the case of the cotangent bundle \(T^*N\) of the Riemannian manifold \(N,\) the Hamiltonian function being the norm associated to the Riemannian metric, and the pair of Lagrangian manifolds being a fiber of the cotangent bundle and the conormal bundle of a compact submanifold. In the final section a very special class of Hamiltonians is introduced for which one can obtain strong lower bounds on the boundary depth. The considerations lead to Corollary 4.4 of which the main theorem (Theorem 1.2) is a special case.