Floer homology and the heat flow (Q866874)

The paper under review is to study the heat flow in the loop space of a closed Riemannian manifold as an adiabatic limit of the Floer gradient flow in the cotangent bundle. The main result (Theorem 1.1) is to establish the natural isomorphism between the symplectic Floer homology on the cotangent bundle \(T^*M\) and the Morse-Witten homology of the free loop space with a classical action functional. The identification of the symplectic Floer homology of the cotangent bundle with the homology of the loop space requires more specific perturbations, the transversality and Theorem A.7 in preparation to identify the heat flow from the classical Morse-Witten theory and the gradient flow from the symplectic Floer homology (see Corollary 1.2). The key technique is to introduce the almost complex structure \(J_{\varepsilon}\) which allows the metric to vary and the method used in [\textit{S. Dostoglou} and \textit{D. A. Salamon}, Ann. Math. (2) 139, 581--640 (1994; Zbl 0812.58031)]. The rest of the detailed paper is to construct a map from one moduli space of heat flows to the space of Floer gradient flows, and to show that this map is well-defined, injective and surjective. Then one compares the linear operators to have coherent orientations identifications. It would be better to see if the potential \(V\) can be changed so that the Morse-Witten homology of the loop spaces also varies from the symplectic Floer homology. The proof of Proposition 3.2 for the uniform estimates of the inverse operator is also crucial, but the role of the perturbation is not quite clear.