Autonomous Hamiltonian flows, Hofer's geometry and persistence modules (Q907070)

In this paper, the authors obtain some robust obstructions (in the sense of Hofer's metric) to representing a Hamiltonian diffeomorphism as a full \(k\)-th power, with \(k\) greater than 1, and to including it into a one-parameter subgroup. From the geometrical point of view, for certain symplectic manifolds, the authors prove that the complement of the set of Hamiltonian diffeomorphisms represented as full \(k\)-th powers contain a ball of arbitrary radius. Moreover, for symplectically aspherical manifolds, they show that the subset of non-autonomous Hamiltonian diffeomorphisms contains a \(C^\infty\)-dense Hofer-open subset. The background is that of filtered Floer homology, enhanced with a periodic automorphism, induced by the natural action of a Hamiltonian diffeomorphism \(\phi\) on the Floer homology of \(\phi^k\), and the main tool is the theory of one-parametric persistence modules. After presenting the above mentioned context, the authors define the spectral spread and its ramifications (new invariants of Hamiltonian diffeomorphisms), then they deal with persistence modules enhanced with a \(\mathbb{Z}_p\) action. The geometric problem concerning the ``distance to \(p-\)th powers'' from Theorem 1.3 is translated into algebraic language. More exactly, the authors prove that \[ \mathrm{ powers}_k(\Sigma\times M,\sigma\oplus\omega)=+\infty, \] where \(\Sigma\) is a closed oriented surface of genus greater than 3, endowed with an area form \(\sigma,\) \(k\) is an integer larger than 1, and \((M,\omega)\) is any closed symplectically aspherical manifold. This theorem is proved by constructing a Hamiltonian egg-beater map and then using the spectral spread and the results on persistence modules. A consequence of Theorem 1.3 is Theorem 1.2 on autonomous diffeomorphisms, but this is proved independently, without using the persistence modules. Next, in the case of surfaces, the authors use a simple Floer homological argument to prove Theorem 1.2. Another main result is Theorem 1.4, which asserts that the subset of non-autonomous Hamiltonian diffeomorphisms on closed symplectically aspherical manifolds contains a \(C^\infty\)-dense Hofer-open subset. Finally, the authors generalize their results to monotone symplectic manifolds and present open problems.