Reductions: precontact versus presymplectic (Q6046843)

The main goal of the paper is to prove a version of Marsden-Weinstein-Meyer symplectic reduction in the contact setting (Theorem 1.1). To achieve this aim, the authors work in greater generalities and allow the constant rank of the structure not to be maximal, i.e., they consider precontact structures. Note also that the underlying distribution is not necessarily defined by a global \(1\)-form. Their major tool consists in working on a presymplectic cover of the precontact manifold, which is an \(\mathbb{R}^\times\)-bundle over the manifold equipped with a presymplectic structure that defines the contact structure through the bundle projection map. In Section 2, the yoga between precontact manifolds and presymplectic \(\mathbb{R}^\times\)-bundles is spelled out. For the paper, a precontact structure of rank \(2r+1\) on a manifold \(M\) is a distribution \(C \subset TM\) whose fibers are of codimension \(1\) and such that, if \(C=\operatorname{ker}(\eta)\) locally for some (locally defined) \(1\)-form \(\eta\), then the \(2\)-form \(d\eta\) has rank \(2r\) on \(C\). An \(\mathbb{R}^\times\)-bundle \(\tau:P \to M\) is a principal bundle over \(M\) with structure group \(\mathbb{R}^\times\). It is called a presymplectic \(\mathbb{R}^\times\)-bundle of rank \(2r+1\) if \(P\) is endowed with a closed \(2\)-form \(\omega\) of rank \(2(r+1)\) which is \(1\)-homogeneous, i.e., pulling back \(\omega\) by the action map \(h_s:P\to P\) for \(s\in \mathbb{R}^\times\) amounts to rescaling by \(s\): \(h_s^\ast(\omega)=s\, \omega\). (To recover contact structures or symplectic \(\mathbb{R}^\times\)-bundles, one needs \(\operatorname{dim}(M)=\operatorname{dim}(P)-1=2r+1\).) The main result of the section is Theorem 2.17. In an abridged form, it states the one-to-one correspondence between precontact manifolds \((M,C)\) of rank \(2r+1\) and isomorphism classes of presymplectic \(\mathbb{R}^\times\)-bundles \((\tau:P\to M, h_\bullet, \omega)\) of rank \(2(r+1)\). Moreover, it is shown that a contactomorphism can be covered by an isomorphism of the corresponding covering presymplectic \(\mathbb{R}^\times\)-bundles, see Proposition 2.19. In Section 3, the authors study a precontact-to-contact reduction theory. It consists in reducing a precontact manifold \((M,C)\) with respect to the foliation \(\mathcal{F}_C\) by maximal integral submanifolds of the characteristic distribution of \(C\). This endows \(M/\mathcal{F}_C\) with a canonical contact structure if it is smooth and the projection \(M\to M/\mathcal{F}_C\) is a surjective submersion (Theorem 3.1). This result is then reinterpreted as a presymplectic-to-symplectic reduction using the constructions from Section 2. Furthermore, variants of these reductions with respect to suitable smaller foliations are stated in Section 3.2 and are a key ingredient for proving the main theorem. A brief review of contact Hamiltonian mechanics is given in Section 4. It is viewed as a simple instance of the precontact/presymplectic setting. The task of Section 5 is twofold. First, it characterizes (co)isotropic and Legendrian/Lagrangian submanifolds in the presence of a precontact/presymplectic structure. Second, it is to define constant rank submanifolds in a contact manifold and to provide a reduction method with respect to those as a precontact-to-contact reduction. Eventually, Theorem 1.1 is proved as part of Section 6. It requires the notion of a contact moment map for a precontact manifold \((M,C)\) equipped with an action of a Lie group \(G\) by contactomorphisms. It is important to remark that a contact moment map \(J:P \to {g}^\ast\) (here \({g}^\ast\) is the dual of the Lie algebra \({g}\) of \(G\)) is defined on a covering presymplectic \(\mathbb{R}^\times\)-bundle \(\tau:P\to M\). The contact moment map is both \(\mathbb{R}^\times\)- and \(G\)-equivariant, where the action \(G\times P \to P\) lifts the one on \(M\). Due to the \(\mathbb{R}^\times\)-equivariance we are forced to consider, for any \(\mu \in {g}^\ast\setminus \{0\}\), the \(\mathbb{R}^\times\)-subbundle \(P_{[\mu]}:= J^{-1}(\{c \mu \mid c \in \mathbb{R}^\times\})\) of \(P\) over \(M_{\mu}:=\tau (P_{[\mu]})\subset M\). Write \({g}_\mu^\circ := \{\xi \in {g} \mid \mu(\xi)=0\) and \(\operatorname{ad}_{\xi}^\ast(\mu)=0\}\), which is a Lie algebra, and let \(G_\mu^\circ\) be the connected Lie subgroup of \(G\) integrating \({g}_\mu^\circ\). Then, under some natural assumptions (see Theorem 6.3), the reduction \(P(\mu):=P_{[\mu]}/G_\mu^\circ\) is a (pre)symplectic \(\mathbb{R}^\times\)-bundle over \(M(\mu)=M_\mu/G_\mu^\circ\) which induces a (pre)contact structure on the latter. Theorem 1.1 then follows as the special `maximal rank' case. There are two illuminating simple examples that conclude the section.