arXiv subjects
Publications and source records attributed to Ely Kerman.
In this paper, we use Floer theory to study the Hofer length functional for paths of Hamiltonian diffeomorphisms which are sufficiently short. In particular, the length minimizing properties of a short Hamiltonian path are related to the properties and number of its periodic orbits.
We use Floer homology to study the Hofer-Zehnder capacity of neighborhoods near a closed symplectic submanifold M of a geometrically bounded and symplectically aspherical ambient manifold. We prove that, when the unit normal bundle of M is homologically trivial in degree dim(M) (for example, if codim(M) > dim(M)), a refined version of the Hofer-Zehnder capacity is finite for all open sets close enough to M. We compute this capacity for certain tubular neighborhoods of M by using a squeezing argument in which the algebraic framework of Floer theory is used to detect nontrivial periodic orbits. As an application, we partially recover some existence results of Arnold for Hamiltonian flows which describe a charged particle moving in a nondegenerate magnetic field on a torus. We also relate our refined capacity to the study of Hamiltonian paths with minimal Hofer length.
In this paper we consider the length minimizing properties of Hamiltonian paths generated by quasi-autonomous Hamiltonians on symplectically aspherical manifolds. Motivated by the work of L. Polterovich and M. Schwarz, we study the role of the fixed global extrema in the Floer complex of the generating Hamiltonian. Our main result determines a natural condition on a fixed global maximum of a Hamiltonian which implies that the corresponding path minimizes the positive Hofer length. We use this to prove that a quasi-autonomous Hamiltonian generates a length minimizing path if it has under-twisted fixed global extrema and no periodic orbits with period one and action greater than the fixed extrema. This, in turn, allows us to produce new examples of autonomous Hamiltonian flows which are length minimizing for all times. These constructions are based on the geometry of coisotropic submanifolds. Finally, we give a new proof of the recent theorem of D. McDuff which states that quasi-autonomous Hamiltonians generate length minimizing paths over short time intervals.
We show that a small neighborhood of a closed symplectic submanifold in a geometrically bounded aspherical symplectic manifold has non-vanishing symplectic homology. As a consequence, we establish the existence of contractible closed characteristics on any thickening of the boundary of the neighborhood. When applied to twisted geodesic flows on compact symplectically aspherical manifolds, this implies the existence of contractible periodic orbits for a dense set of low energy values.
We construct a new aperiodic symplectic plug and hence new smooth counterexamples to the Hamiltonian Seifert conjecture in R^{2n} for n>2. In other words, we develop an alternative procedure, to those of V. L. Ginzburg and M. Herman, for constructing smooth Hamiltonian flows, on the standard symplectic R^{2n} for n>2, which have compact regular level sets that contain no periodic orbits. The plug described here is a modification of those built by Ginzburg. In particular, we utilize a different "trap" which makes the necessary embeddings of this plug much easier to construct.
For Hamiltonian flows we establish the existence of periodic orbits on a sequence of level sets approaching a Bott-nondegenerate symplectic extremum of the Hamiltonian. As a consequence, we show that a charge on a compact manifold with a nondegenerate (i.e. symplectic) magnetic field has periodic orbits on a sequence of energy levels converging to zero.
The Hamiltonian flow of the standard metric Hamiltonian with respect to the twisted symplectic structure on the cotangent bundle describes the motion of a charged particle on the base. We prove that under certain natural hypotheses the number of periodic orbits on low energy levels for this flow is at least the sum of Betti numbers of the base. The problem is closely related to the existence question for periodic orbits on energy levels of a proper Hamiltonian near a Morse-Bott non-degenerate minimum. In this case, when some extra requirements are met, we also give a lower bound for the number of periodic orbits. Both of these questions are very similar to the Weinstein conjecture but differ from it in that the energy levels may fail to have contact type. We show that the bounded sets in the cotangent bundle to the torus, with a twisted symplectic structure, have finite Hofer-Zehnder capacity. As a consequence, we obtain the existence of periodic orbits on almost all energy levels for magnetic fields on tori.
In this paper we produce a lower bound for the number of periodic orbits of certain Hamiltonian vector fields near Bott-nondegenerate symplectic critical submanifolds. This result is then related to the problem of finding closed orbits of the motion of a charged low energy particle on a Riemannian manifold under the influence of a magnetic field