Conley pairs in geometry -- Lusternik-Schnirelmann theory and more

DOI10.1016/J.EXMATH.2017.10.003MaRDI QIDQ2003390zbMATH OpenOpenAlexFDO

Publication date 8 July 2019

Published in Expositiones Mathematicae (Search for Journal in Brave)

Full work available at URL https://arxiv.org/abs/1709.05010

Conley index pairs CW decomposition dynamical thickening flow selector Lusternik-Schnirelmann category Morse filtration

Research exposition (monographs, survey articles) pertaining to dynamical systems and ergodic theory (37-02) Notions of recurrence and recurrent behavior in topological dynamical systems (37B20) Index theory for dynamical systems, Morse-Conley indices (37B30) Lyusternik-Shnirel'man category of a space, topological complexity à la Farber, topological robotics (topological aspects) (55M30) Research exposition (monographs, survey articles) pertaining to manifolds and cell complexes (57-02) Abstract critical point theory (Morse theory, Lyusternik-Shnirel'man theory, etc.) in infinite-dimensional spaces (58E05)

Abstract: Firstly, we wish to motivate that Conley pairs, realized via Salamon's definition [17], are rather useful building blocks in geometry: Initially we met Conley pairs in an attempt to construct Morse filtrations of free loop spaces [21]. From this fell off quite naturally, firstly, an alternative proof [20] of the cell attachment theorem in Morse theory [13] and, secondly, some ideas [12] how to try to organize the closures of the unstable manifolds of a Morse-Smale gradient flow as a CW decomposition of the underlying manifold. Relaxing non-degeneracy of critical points to isolatedness we use these Conley pairs to implement the gradient flow proof of the Lusternik-Schnirelmann Theorem [10] proposed in Bott's survey [3]. Secondly, we shall use this opportunity to provide an exposition of Lusternik-Schnirelmann (LS) theory based on thickenings of unstable manifolds via Conley pairs. We shall cover the Lusternik-Schnirelmann Theorem [10], cuplength, subordination, the LS refined minimax principle, and a variant of the LS category called ambient category.

Review text

The paper under review is an expository article investigating Conley pairs and their applications. While Conley theory can be used to study the gradient flow in general, the paper looks at the special case where the critical points are only either non-degenerate or isolated. This leads to the study of Morse theory and Lusternik-Schnirelmann category, respectively. A relationship between these two topics is proved in the celebrated Lusternik-Schnirelmann theorem, which says that if \(f\) is a \(C^2\) function on a closed manifold, then the number of critical points of \(f\) bounds from above the (non-reduced) Lusternik-Schnirelmann category. Other tools for detecting critical points, such as cup-length, are studied in this paper.

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