arXiv subjects

Mark McLean

Publications and source records attributed to Mark McLean.

29 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

arXiv2016

Floer Cohomology, Multiplicity and the Log Canonical Threshold

Let f be a polynomial over the complex numbers with an isolated singularity at 0. We show that the multiplicity and the log canonical threshold of f at 0 are invariants of the link of f viewed as a contact submanifold of the sphere. This is done by first constructing a spectral sequence converging to the fixed point Floer cohomology of any iterate of the Milnor monodromy map whose E^1 page is explicitly described in terms of a log resolution of f. This spectral sequence is a generalization of a formula by A'Campo. By looking at this spectral sequence, we get a purely Floer theoretic description of the multiplicity and log canonical threshold of f.

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arXiv2015

Affine Varieties, Singularities and the Growth Rate of Wrapped Floer Cohomology

In this paper, we give partial answers to the following questions: Which contact manifolds are contactomorphic to links of isolated complex singularities? Which symplectic manifolds are symplectomorphic to smooth affine varieties? The invariant that we will use to distinguish such manifolds is called the growth rate of wrapped Floer cohomology. Using this invariant we show that if Q is a simply connected manifold whose unit cotangent bundle is contactomorphic to the link of an isolated singularity or whose cotangent bundle is symplectomorphic to a smooth affine variety then M must be rationally elliptic and so it must have certain bounds on its Betti numbers.

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arXiv2015

Reeb orbits and the minimal discrepancy of an isolated singularity

Let A be an affine variety inside a complex N dimensional vector space which has an isolated singularity at the origin. The intersection of A with a very small sphere turns out to be a contact manifold called the link of A. Any contact manifold contactomorphic to the link of A is said to be Milnor fillable by A. If the first Chern class of our link is torsion then we can assign an invariant of our singularity called the minimal discrepancy, which is an important invariant in birational geometry. We define an invariant of the link up to contactomorphism using Conley-Zehnder indices of Reeb orbits and then we relate this invariant with the minimal discrepancy. As a result we show that the standard contact 5 dimensional sphere has a unique Milnor filling up to normalization proving a conjecture by Seidel.

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arXiv2014

Bounding Lagrangian widths via geodesic paths

The width of a Lagrangian is the largest capacity of a ball that can be symplectically embedded into the ambient manifold such that the ball intersects the Lagrangian exactly along the real part of the ball. Due to Dimitroglou Rizell, finite width is an obstruction to a Lagrangian admitting an exact Lagrangian cap in the sense of Eliashberg-Murphy. In this paper we introduce a new method for bounding the width of a Lagrangian Q by considering the Lagrangian Floer cohomology of an auxiliary Lagrangian L with respect to a Hamiltonian whose chords correspond to geodesic paths in Q. This is formalized as a wrapped version of the Floer-Hofer-Wysocki capacity and we establish an associated energy-capacity inequality with the help of a closed-open map. For any orientable Lagrangian Q admitting a metric of non-positive sectional curvature in a Liouville manifold, we show the width of Q is bounded above by four times its displacement energy.

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arXiv2012

On the symplectic invariance of log Kodaira dimension

Suppose that A and B are symplectomorphic smooth affine varieties. If A is acylic of dimension 2 then B has the same log Kodaira dimension as A. If the dimension of A is 3, has log Kodaira dimension 2 and satisfies some other conditions then B cannot be of log general type. We also show that if A and B are symplectomorphic affine varieties of any dimension then any compactification of A by a projective variety is uniruled if and only if any such compactification of B is uniruled.

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arXiv2012

Local Floer homology and infinitely many simple Reeb orbits

Let Q be a Riemannian manifold such that the Betti numbers of its free loop space with respect to some coefficient field are unbounded. We show that every contact form on its unit contangent bundle supporting the natural contact structure has infinitely many simple Reeb orbits. This is an extension of a theorem by Gromoll and Meyer. We also show that if a compact manifold admits a Stein fillable contact structure then there is a possibly different such structure which also has infinitely many simple Reeb orbits for every supporting contact form. We use local Floer homology along with symplectic homology to prove these facts.

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arXiv2012

The growth rate of symplectic homology and affine varieties

We will show that the cotangent bundle of a manifold whose free loopspace homology grows exponentially is not symplectomorphic to any smooth affine variety. We will also show that the unit cotangent bundle of such a manifold is not Stein fillable by a Stein domain whose completion is symplectomorphic to a smooth affine variety. For instance, these results hold for end connect sums of simply connected manifolds whose cohomology with coefficients in some field has at least two generators. We use an invariant called the growth rate of symplectic homology to prove this result.

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arXiv2011

A spectral sequence for symplectic homology

We construct a spectral sequence converging to symplectic homology of a Lefschetz fibration whose E1 page is related to Floer homology of the monodromy symplectomorphism and its iterates. We use this to show the existence of fixed points of certain symplectomorphisms.

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arXiv2011

Computability and the growth rate of symplectic homology

For each n greater than 7 we explicitly construct a sequence of Stein manifolds diffeomorphic to complex affine space of dimension n so that there is no algorithm to tell us in general whether a given such Stein manifold is symplectomorphic to the first one or not. We prove a similar undecidability result for contact structures on the 2n - 1 dimensional sphere. We can generalize these results by replacing com- plex affine space with any smooth affine variety of dimension n and the 2n - 1 dimensional sphere with any smooth affine variety intersected with a sufficiently large sphere. We prove these theorems by using an invariant called the growth rate of symplectic homology to reduce these problems to an undecidability result for groups.

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arXiv2009

Non-displaceable contact embeddings and infinitely many leaf-wise intersections

We construct using Lefschetz fibrations a large family of contact manifolds with the following properties: Any bounding contact embedding into an exact symplectic manifold satisfying a mild topological assumption is non-displaceable and generically has infinitely many leaf-wise intersection points. Moreover, any Stein filling has infinite dimensional symplectic homology.

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arXiv2009

Lefschetz fibrations and symplectic homology

We show that for each k > 3 there are infinitely many finite type Stein manifolds diffeomorphic to Euclidean space R^{2k} which are pairwise distinct as symplectic manifolds.

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