Hofer geometry and cotangent fibers

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Abstract: For a class of Riemannian manifolds that include products of arbitrary compact manifolds with manifolds of nonpositive sectional curvature on the one hand, or with certain positive-curvature examples such as spheres of dimension at least 3 and compact semisimple Lie groups on the other, we show that the Hamiltonian diffeomorphism group of the cotangent bundle contains as subgroups infinite-dimensional normed vector spaces that are bi-Lipschitz embedded with respect to Hofer's metric; moreover these subgroups can be taken to consist of diffeomorphisms supported in an arbitrary neighborhood of the zero section. In fact, the orbit of a fiber of the cotangent bundle with respect to any of these subgroups is quasi-isometrically embedded with respect to the induced Hofer metric on the orbit of the fiber under the whole group. The diffeomorphisms in these subgroups are obtained from reparametrizations of the geodesic flow. Our proofs involve a study of the Hamiltonian-perturbed Floer complex of a pair of cotangent fibers (or, more generally, of a conormal bundle together with a cotangent fiber). Although the homology of this complex vanishes, an analysis of its boundary depth yields the lower bounds on the Lagrangian Hofer metric required for our main results.


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)].NEWLINENEWLINEThe author studies the slightly more general question of the existence of infinite-rank subgroups.NEWLINENEWLINEThe 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 \(a,b \in\mathbb R^{\infty}\) NEWLINE\[NEWLINE | a-b |_{\infty} \leq d(\Phi (a) - \Phi (b) ) \leq\mathrm{osc} (a-b) .NEWLINE\]NEWLINE 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.NEWLINENEWLINEThe 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.NEWLINENEWLINEIn 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.











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