arXiv subjects
Publications and source records attributed to Leonid Polterovich.
We discuss a link between "hard" symplectic topology and an unsharpness principle for generalized quantum observables (positive operator valued measures). The link is provided by the Berezin-Toeplitz quantization.
We introduce new invariants associated to collections of compact subsets of a symplectic manifold. They are defined through an elementary-looking variational problem involving Poisson brackets. The proof of the non-triviality of these invariants involves various flavors of Floer theory. We present applications to approximation theory on symplectic manifolds and to Hamiltonian dynamics.
The quantum homology of the monotone complex quadric surface splits into the sum of two fields. We outline a proof of the following statement: The unities of these fields give rise to distinct symplectic quasi-states defined by asymptotic spectral invariants. In fact, these quasi-states turn out to be "supported" on disjoint Lagrangian submanifolds. Our method involves a spectral sequence which starts at homology of the loop space of the 2-sphere and whose higher differentials are computed via symplectic field theory, in particular with the help of the Bourgeois-Oancea exact sequence.
This paper is a fusion of a survey and a research article. We focus on certain rigidity phenomena in function spaces associated to a symplectic manifold. Our starting point is a lower bound obtained in an earlier paper with Zapolsky for the uniform norm of the Poisson bracket of a pair of functions in terms of symplectic quasi-states. After a short review of the theory of symplectic quasi-states, we extend this bound to the case of iterated Poisson brackets. A new technical ingredient is the use of symplectic integrators. In addition, we discuss some applications to symplectic approximation theory and present a number of open problems.
Lie quasi-states on a real Lie algebra are functionals which are linear on any abelian subalgebra. We show that on the symplectic Lie algebra of rank at least 3 there is only one continuous non-linear Lie quasi-state (up to a scalar factor, modulo linear functionals). It is related to the asymptotic Maslov index of paths of symplectic matrices.
We discuss $C^0$-continuous homogeneous quasi-morphisms on the identity component of the group of compactly supported symplectomorphisms of a symplectic manifold. Such quasi-morphisms extend to the $C^0$-closure of this group inside the homeomorphism group. We show that for standard symplectic balls of any dimension, as well as for compact oriented surfaces, other than the sphere, the space of such quasi-morphisms is infinite-dimensional. In the case of surfaces, we give a user-friendly topological characterization of such quasi-morphisms. We also present an application to Hofer's geometry on the group of Hamiltonian diffeomorphisms of the ball.
Gromov's famous non-squeezing theorem (1985) states that the standard symplectic ball cannot be symplectically squeezed into any cylinder of smaller radius. Does there exist an analogue of this result in contact geometry? Our main finding is that the answer depends on the sizes of the domains in question: We establish contact non-squeezing on large scales, and show that it disappears on small scales. The algebraic counterpart of the (non)-squeezing problem for contact domains is the question of existence of a natural partial order on the universal cover of the contactomorphisms group of a contact manifold. In contrast to our earlier beliefs, we show that the answer to this question is very sensitive to the topology of the manifold. For instance, we prove that the standard contact sphere is non-orderable while the real projective space is known to be orderable. Our methods include a new embedding technique in contact geometry as well as a generalized Floer homology theory which contains both cylindrical contact homology and Hamiltonian Floer homology. We discuss links to a number of miscellaneous topics such as topology of free loops spaces, quantum mechanics and semigroups. An erratum is attached whose purpose is to is to correct a number of inconsistencies in the main paper. These are related to the grading of generalized Floer homology and do not affect formulations and proofs of the main results of the paper.
The paper is devoted to function theory on symplectic manifolds. We study a natural class of functionals involving the double Poisson brackets from the viewpoint of their robustness properties with respect to small perturbations in the uniform norm. We observe an hierarchy of such robustness properties. The methods involve Hofer's geometry on the symplectic side and Landau-Hadamard-Kolmogorov inequalities on the function-theoretic side.
We show that there is an hierarchy of intersection rigidity properties of sets in a closed symplectic manifold: some sets cannot be displaced by symplectomorphisms from more sets than the others. We also find new examples of rigidity of intersections involving, in particular, specific fibers of moment maps of Hamiltonian torus actions, monotone Lagrangian submanifolds (following the works of P.Albers and P.Biran-O.Cornea), as well as certain, possibly singular, sets defined in terms of Poisson-commutative subalgebras of smooth functions. In addition, we get some geometric obstructions to semi-simplicity of the quantum homology of symplectic manifolds. The proofs are based on the Floer-theoretical machinery of partial symplectic quasi-states.
We review and streamline our previous results and the results of Y.Ostrover on the existence of Calabi quasi-morphisms and symplectic quasi-states on symplectic manifolds with semi-simple quantum homology. As an illustration, we discuss the case of symplectic toric Fano 4-manifolds. We present also new results due to D.McDuff: she observed that for the existence of quasi-morphisms/quasi-states it suffices to assume that the quantum homology contains a field as a direct summand, and she showed that this weaker condition holds true for one point blow-ups of non-uniruled symplectic manifolds.
Consider a functional associating to a pair of compactly supported smooth functions on a symplectic manifold the maximum of their Poisson bracket. We show that this functional is lower semi-continuous with respect to the product uniform (C^0) norm on the space of pairs of such functions. This extends previous results of Cardin-Viterbo and Zapolsky. The proof involves theory of geodesics of the Hofer metric on the group of Hamiltonian diffeomorphisms. We also discuss a failure of a similar semi-continuity phenomenon for multiple Poisson brackets of three or more functions.
Given a bi-Lipschitz measure-preserving homeomorphism of a compact metric measure space of finite dimension, consider the sequence formed by the Lipschitz norms of its iterations. We obtain lower bounds on the growth rate of this sequence assuming that our homeomorphism mixes a Lipschitz function. In particular, we get a universal lower bound which depends on the dimension of the space but not on the rate of mixing. Furthermore, we get a lower bound on the growth rate in the case of rapid mixing. The latter turns out to be sharp: the corresponding example is given by a symbolic dynamical system associated to the Rudin-Shapiro sequence.
For a class of symplectic manifolds, we introduce a functional which assigns a real number to any pair of continuous functions on the manifold. This functional has a number of interesting properties. On the one hand, it is Lipschitz with respect to the uniform norm. On the other hand, it serves as a measure of non-commutativity of functions in the sense of the Poisson bracket, the operation which involves first derivatives of the functions. Furthermore, the same functional gives rise to a non-trivial lower bound for the error of the simultaneous measurement of a pair of non-commuting Hamiltonians. These results manifest a link between the algebraic structure of the group of Hamiltonian diffeomorphisms and the function theory on a symplectic manifold. The above-mentioned functional comes from a special homogeneous quasi-morphism on the universal cover of the group, which is rooted in the Floer theory.
We report on an "anti-Gleason" phenomenon in classical mechanics: in contrast with the quantum case, the algebra of classical observables can carry a non-linear quasi-state, a monotone functional which is linear on all subspaces generated by Poisson-commutative functions. We present an example of such a quasi-state in the case when the phase space is the 2-sphere. This example lies in the intersection of two seemingly remote mathematical theories - symplectic topology and the theory of topological quasi-states. We use this quasi-state to estimate the error of the simultaneous measurement of non-commuting Hamiltonians.
Given an orientation-preserving diffeomorphism of the interval [0;1], consider the uniform norm of the differential of its n-th iteration. We get a function of n called the growth sequence. Its asymptotic behaviour is an interesting invariant which naturally appears both in geometry of the diffeomorphisms groups and in smooth dynamics. Our main result is the following Gap Theorem: the growth rate of this sequence is either exponential, or at most quadratic with n. Further, we construct diffeomorphisms with quite an irregular behaviour of the growth sequence. This construction easily extends to arbitrary manifolds.
Given a Laplace eigenfunction on a surface, we study the distribution of its extrema on the nodal domains. It is classically known that the absolute value of the eigenfunction is asymptotically bounded by the 4-th root of the eigenvalue. It turns out that the number of nodal domains where the eigenfunction has an extremum of such order, remains bounded as the eigenvalue tends to infinity. We also observe that certain restrictions on the distribution of nodal extrema and a version of the Courant nodal domain theorem are valid for a rather wide class of functions on surfaces. These restrictions follow from a bound in the spirit of Kronrod and Yomdin on the average number of connected components of level sets.
We establish a link between symplectic topology and a recently emerged branch of functional analysis called the theory of quasi-states and quasi-measures. In the symplectic context quasi-states can be viewed as an algebraic way of packaging certain information contained in Floer theory, and in particular in spectral invariants of Hamiltonian diffeomorphisms introduced recently by Yong-Geun Oh. As a consequence we prove a number of new results on rigidity of intersections in symplectic manifolds. This work is a part of a joint project with Paul Biran.
The paper deals with asymptotic nodal geometry for the Laplace-Beltrami operator on closed surfaces. Given an eigenfunction f corresponding to a large eigenvalue, we study local asymmetry of the distribution of sign(f) with respect to the surface area. It is measured as follows: take any disc centered at the nodal line {f=0}, and pick at random a point in this disc. What is the probability that the function assumes a positive value at the chosen point? We show that this quantity may decay logarithmically as the eigenvalue goes to infinity, but never faster than that. In other words, only a mild local asymmetry may appear. The proof combines methods due to Donnelly-Fefferman and Nadirashvili with a new result on harmonic functions in the unit disc.