Staircase symmetries in Hirzebruch surfaces

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Publication:6065486



Abstract: This paper continues the investigation of staircases in the family of Hirzebruch surfaces formed by blowing up the projective plane with weight b, that was started in Bertozzi, Holm et al. in arXiv:2010.08567. We explain the symmetries underlying the structure of the set of b that admit staircases, and show how the properties of these symmetries arise from a governing Diophantine equation. We also greatly simplify the techniques needed to show that a family of steps does form a staircase by using arithmetic properties of the accumulation function. There should be analogous results about both staircases and mutations for the other rational toric domains considered, for example, by Cristofaro-Gardiner et al. in arXiv:2004.07829 and by Casals--Vianna in arXiv:2004.13232.


Recently, \textit{M. Bertozzi} et al. [Assoc. Women Math. Ser. 27, 47--157 (2021; Zbl 1512.53080)] studied the rich quantitative and numerical structures found in the so-called ellipsoid embedding function of the symplectic Hirzebruch surface \(H_b := \mathbb CP^2 \# \overline{\mathbb CP}^2(b)\) where \(\mathbb CP^2(b)\) denotes the projective plane with weight \(b \in [0,1)\). For a real number \(\lambda\), let \(\lambda X := (X, \lambda \omega)\) and define the ellipsoid \(E(c,d) \subset \mathbb{C}^2\) to be the set \[ E(c,d) = \left\{(\zeta_1,\zeta_2) \in \mathbb C^2 \mid \pi \left(\frac{|\zeta_1|^2}{c} + \frac{|\zeta_2|^2}{d}\right) < 1\right\}. \] The ellipsoid embedding function is \[ c_X(z) := \inf \left\{\lambda \mid \text{there is a symplectic embedding } E(1,z) \hookrightarrow \lambda X\right\}. \] The study of the ellipsoid embedding function was initiated by \textit{D. McDuff} and \textit{F. Schlenk} [Ann. Math. (2) 175, No. 3, 1191--1282 (2012; Zbl 1254.53111)] in the case of \(B^4\). The graph of the ellipsoid embedding function is sometimes a piecewise linear function that resembles an infinite staircase, accumulating at certain values. The paper under review discusses symmetries in the set of parameters \(b \in [0,1)\) for which \(c_{H_b}(z)\) admits an infinite staircase. There are six families of infinite staircases \(\mathcal S^U_{\ell}\) \(\mathcal S^U_{u}\), \(\mathcal S^L_{\ell}\), \(\mathcal S^L_u\), \(\mathcal S^E_\ell\) and \(\mathcal S^E_u\) indexed by \(n \geq 0\). The values of \(b\) that corresponds to these families appear as the boundaries of certain intervals \(J_{\boldsymbol B} = (\beta_{\boldsymbol B,\ell},\beta_{\boldsymbol B,u}) \subset (0,1)\) that correspond to three so-called center-blocking classes \(\boldsymbol B^U_n\), \(\boldsymbol B^L_n\) and \(\boldsymbol B^E_n\) for \(n \geq 0\). Define shift and reflection functions \[ S \left(\frac pq\right) := \frac{6p-q}{p}, \qquad R \left(\frac pq\right) := \frac{6p-35}{p-6q}. \] The main result of the paper under review is that for each \(i\geq 1\), there are staircase families \((S^i)^\#(\mathcal S^U)\) and \((S^i)^\#(\mathcal S^L)\) that are obtained by acting with \(S\) and \(R\) on the centers of the blocking classes \(\boldsymbol B^U_n\) and \(\boldsymbol B^L_n\), respectively. Moreover \((S^i)^\#(\mathcal S^L) = (S^iR)^\#(\mathcal S^U)\).











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