arXiv subjects
Publications and source records attributed to Daniel J. F. Fox.
Conditions are given under which an infinitesimal automorphism of a torsion-free connection preserving a symplectic form is necessarily a symplectic vector field. An example is given of a compact symplectic manifold admitting a flat symplectic connection and an infinitesimal automorphism that is not symplectic.
There are described equations for a pair comprising a Riemannian metric and a Killing field on a surface that contain as special cases the Einstein Weyl equations (in the sense of D. Calderbank) and a real version of a special case of the Abelian vortex equations, and it is shown that the property that a metric solve these equations is preserved by the Ricci flow. The equations are solved explicitly, and among the metrics obtained are all steady gradient Ricci solitons (e.g. the the cigar soliton) and the sausage metric; there are found other examples of eternal, ancient, and immortal Ricci flows, as well as some Ricci flows with conical singularities.
An AH (affine hypersurface) structure is a pair comprising a projective equivalence class of torsion-free connections and a conformal structure satisfying a compatibility condition which is automatic in two dimensions. They generalize Weyl structures, and a pair of AH structures is induced on a co-oriented non-degenerate immersed hypersurface in flat affine space. The author has defined for AH structures Einstein equations, which specialize on the one hand to the usual Einstein Weyl equations and, on the other hand, to the equations for affine hyperspheres. Here these equations are solved for Riemannian signature AH structures on compact orientable surfaces, the deformation spaces of solutions are described, and some aspects of the geometry of these structures are related. Every such structure is either Einstein Weyl (in the sense defined for surfaces by Calderbank) or is determined by a pair comprising a conformal structure and a cubic holomorphic differential, and so by a convex flat real projective structure. In the latter case it can be identified with a solution of the Abelian vortex equations on an appropriate power of the canonical bundle. On the cone over a surface of genus at least two carrying an Einstein AH structure there are Monge-Ampère metrics of Lorentzian and Riemannian signature and a Riemannian Einstein Kähler affine metric. A mean curvature zero spacelike immersed Lagrangian submanifold of a para-Kähler four-manifold with constant para-holomorphic sectional curvature inherits an Einstein AH structure, and this is used to deduce some restrictions on such immersions.
This is an account of some aspects of the geometry of Kähler affine metrics based on considering them as smooth metric measure spaces and applying the comparison geometry of Bakry-Emery Ricci tensors. Such techniques yield a version for Kähler affine metrics of Yau's Schwarz lemma for volume forms. By a theorem of Cheng and Yau there is a canonical Kähler affine Einstein metric on a proper convex domain, and the Schwarz lemma gives a direct proof of its uniqueness up to homothety. The potential for this metric is a function canonically associated to the cone, characterized by the property that its level sets are hyperbolic affine spheres foliating the cone. It is shown that for an $n$-dimensional cone a rescaling of the canonical potential is an $n$-normal barrier function in the sense of interior point methods for conic programming. It is explained also how to construct from the canonical potential Monge-Ampère metrics of both Riemannian and Lorentzian signatures, and a mean curvature zero conical Lagrangian submanifold of the flat para-Kähler space.
It is shown that a (curved) projective structure on a smooth manifold determines on the Poisson algebra of smooth, fiberwise-polynomial functions on the cotangent bundle a one-parameter family of graded star products. For a particular value of the parameter (corresponding to half-densities) the star product is symmetric, and specializes in the projectively flat case to the one constructed previously by C. Duval, P. Lecomte, and V. Ovsienko. A limiting form of this family of star products yields a commutative deformation of the symmetric tensor algebra of the manifold. A basic ingredient of the proofs is the construction of projectively invariant multilinear operators on bundles of weighted symmetric k-vectors. The construction works except for a discrete set of excluded weights and generalizes the Rankin-Cohen brackets of modular forms.
Contact path geometries are curved geometric structures on a contact manifold comprising smooth families of paths modeled on the family of all isotropic lines in the projectivization of a symplectic vector space. Locally such a structure is equivalent to the graphs in the space of independent and depedent variables of the family of solutions of a system of an odd number of second order ODE's subject to a single maximally non-integrable constraint. A subclass of contact path geometries is distinguished by the vanishing of an invariant contact torsion. For this subclass the equivalence problem is solved by constructing a normalized Cartan connection using the methods of Tanaka-Morimoto-Čap-Schichl. The geometric meaning of the contact torsion is described. If a secondary contact torsion vanishes then the locally defined space of contact paths admits a split quaternionic contact structure (analogous to the quaternionic contact structures studied by O. Biquard).
A contact projective structure is a contact path geometry the paths of which are among the geodesics of some affine connection. In the manner of T.Y. Thomas there is associated to each contact projective structure an ambient affine connection on a symplectic manifold with one-dimensional fibers over the contact manifold and using this the local equivalence problem for contact projective structures is solved by the construction of a canonical regular Cartan connection. This Cartan connection is normal if and only if an invariant contact torsion vanishes. Every contact projective structure determines canonical paths transverse to the contact structure which fill out the contact projective structure to give a full projective structure, and the vanishing of the contact torsion implies the contact projective ambient connection agrees with the Thomas ambient connection of the corresponding projective structure. An analogue of the classical Beltrami theorem is proved for pseudo-hermitian manifolds with transverse symmetry.
H. Sato introduced a Schwarzian derivative of a contactomorphism of three-dimensional Euclidean space and with T. Ozawa described its basic properties. In this note their construction is extended to all odd dimensions and to non-flat contact projective structures. The contact projective Schwarzian derivative of a contact projective structure is defined to be a cocycle of the contactomorphism group measuring the extent to which a contactomorphism fails to be an automorphism of the contact projective structure. For the flat model contact projective structure this gives a contact Schwarzian derivative associating to a contactomorphism of Euclidean space a tensor which vanishes if and only if the given contactomorphism is an element of the linear symplectic group acting by linear fractional transformations.