arXiv subjects
Publications and source records attributed to Yael Karshon.
If a Lie group acts on a manifold freely and properly, pulling back by the quotient map gives an isomorphism between the differential forms on the quotient manifold and the basic differential forms upstairs. We show that this result remains true for actions that are not necessarily free nor proper, as long as the identity component acts properly, where on the quotient space we take differential forms in the diffeological sense.
A key result in equivariant symplectic geometry is Delzant's classification of compact connected symplectic toric manifolds. The moment map induces an embedding of the quotient of the manifold by the torus action into the dual of the Lie algebra of the torus; its image is a unimodular ("Delzant") polytope; this gives a bijection between unimodular polytopes and isomorphism classes of compact connected symplectic toric manifolds. In this paper we extend Delzant's classification to non-compact symplectic toric manifolds. For a non-compact symplectic toric manifold the image of the moment map need not be convex and the induced map on the quotient need not be an embedding. Moreover, even when the map on the quotient is an embedding, its image no longer determines the symplectic toric manifold; a degree two characteristic class on the quotient makes an appearance. Nevertheless, the quotient is a manifold with corners, and the induced map from the quotient to the dual of the Lie algebra is what we call a unimodular local embedding. We classify non-compact symplectic toric manifolds in terms of manifolds with corners equipped with degree two cohomology classes and unimodular local embeddings into the dual of the Lie algebra of the corresponding torus. The main new ingredient is the construction of a symplectic toric manifold from such data. The proof passes through an equivalence of categories between symplectic toric manifolds and symplectic toric bundles over a fixed unimodular local embedding. This equivalence also gives a geometric interpretation of the degree two cohomology class.
Given a symplectic manifold, we ask in how many different ways can a torus act on it. Classification theorems in equivariant symplectic geometry can sometimes tell that two Hamiltonian torus actions are inequivalent, but often they do not tell whether the underlying symplectic manifolds are (non-equivariantly) symplectomorphic. For two dimensional torus actions on closed symplectic four-manifolds, we reduce the counting question to combinatorics, by expressing the manifold as a symplectic blowup in a way that is compatible with all the torus actions simultaneously. For this we use the theory of pseudoholomorphic curves.
A symplectic manifold that is obtained from the complex projective plane by k blowups is encoded by k+1 parameters: the size of the initial complex projective plane, and the sizes of the blowups. We determine which values of these parameters yield symplectomorphic manifolds.
A Hamiltonian circle action on a compact symplectic manifold is known to be a closed geodesic with respect to the Hofer metric on the group of Hamiltonian diffeomorphisms. If the momentum map attains its minimum or maximum at an isolated fixed point with isotropy weights not all equal to plus or minus one, then this closed geodesic can be deformed into a loop of shorter Hofer length. In this paper we give a lower bound for the possible amount of shortening, and we give a lower bound for the index ("number of independent shortening directions"). If the minimum or maximum is attained along a submanifold B, then we deform the circle action into a loop of shorter Hofer length whenever the isotropy weights have sufficiently large absolute values and the normal bundle of B is sufficiently un-twisted.
We show that if a holomorphic $n$ dimensional compact torus action on a compact connected complex manifold of complex dimension $n$ has a fixed point then the manifold is equivariantly biholomorphic to a smooth toric variety.
The main contribution of this paper is a generalization of several previous localization theories in equivariant symplectic geometry, including the classical Atiyah-Bott/Berline-Vergne localization theorem, as well as many cases of the localization via the norm-square of the momentum map as initiated and developed by Witten, Paradan, and Woodward. Our version unifies and generalizes these theories by using noncompact cobordisms as in previous work of Guillemin, Ginzburg, and Karshon, and by introducing a more flexible notion of `polarization' than in previous theories. Our localization formulas are also valid for closed 2-forms that may be degenerate. As a corollary, we are able to answer a question posed some time ago by Shlomo Sternberg concerning the classical Brianchon-Gram polytope decomposition,. We illustrate our theory using concrete examples motivated by our answer to Sternberg's question.
We construct all possible Hamiltonian torus actions for which all the non-empty reduced spaces are two dimensional (and not single points) and the manifold is connected and compact, or, more generally, the moment map is proper as a map to a convex set. This construction completes the classification of tall complexity one spaces.
We show that every effective smooth action of a Lie group G on a manifold M is a diffeomorphism from G onto its image in Diff(M), where the image is equipped with the subset diffeology of the functional diffeology.
We consider orbifolds as diffeological spaces. This gives rise to a natural notion of differentiable maps between orbifolds, making them into a subcategory of diffeology. We prove that the diffeological approach to orbifolds is equivalent to Satake's notion of a V-manifold and to Haefliger's notion of an orbifold. This follows from a lemma: a diffeomorphism (in the diffeological sense) of finite linear quotients lifts to an equivariant diffeomorphism.
Let a torus T act effectively on a compact connected cooriented contact manifold, and let Psi be the natural momentum map on the symplectization. We prove that, if dim T > 2, the union of the origin with the image of Psi is a convex polyhedral cone, the non-zero level sets of Psi are connected (while the zero level set can be disconnected), and the momentum map is open as a map to its image. This answers a question posed by Eugene Lerman, who proved similar results when the zero level set is empty. We also analyze examples with dim T <= 2.
A theorem of Tietze and Nakamija, from 1928, asserts that if a subset X of R^n is closed, connected, and locally convex, then it is convex. We give an analogous "local to global convexity" theorem when the inclusion map of X to R^n is replaced by a map from a topological space X to R^n that satisfies certain local properties. We say that a map from a topological space to R^n is convex if every two points in the space can be connected by a path whose composition with the map is a weakly monotone parametrization of a straight line segment. Let X be a connected Hausdorff topological space, let T be a convex subset of R^n, and let Psi: X \to T be a continuous proper map. Suppose that every point in X is contained in an open set U such that the map Psi|_U: U \to Psi(U) is convex and open. Then the map Psi: X \to Ψ(X) is convex and open. Consequently, its image is convex and its level sets are connected. Our motivation comes from the Condevaux-Dazord-Molino proof of the Atiyah-Guillemin-Sternberg convexity theorem in symplectic geometry.
Let (M,ω) be a four dimensional compact connected symplectic manifold. We prove that (M,ω) admits only finitely many inequivalent Hamiltonian effective 2-torus actions. Consequently, if M is simply connected, the number of conjugacy classes of 2-tori in the symplectomorphism group Sympl(M,ω) is finite. Our proof is "soft". The proof uses the fact that for symplectic blow-ups of \CP^2 the restriction of the period map to the set of exceptional homology classes is proper. In an appendix, we describe results of McDuff that give a properness result for a general compact symplectic four-manifold, using the theory of J-holomorphic curves.
Euler Maclaurin formulas for a polytope express the sum of the values of a function over the lattice points in the polytope in terms of integrals of the function and its derivatives over faces of the polytope or its expansions. Exact Euler Maclaurin formulas [Khovanskii-Pukhlikov, Cappell-Shaneson, Guillemin, Brion-Vergne] apply to exponential or polynomial functions; Euler Maclaurin formulas with remainder [Karshon-Sternberg-Weitsman] apply to more general smooth functions. In this paper we review these results and present proofs of the exact formulas obtained by these authors, using elementary methods. We then use an algebraic formalism due to Cappell and Shaneson to relate the different formulas.
We show that the Gromov width of the Grassmannian of complex k-planes in C^n is equal to one when the symplectic form is normalized so that it generates the integral cohomology in degree 2. We deduce the lower bound from more general results. For example, if a compact manifold N with an integral symplectic form omega admits a Hamiltonian circle action with a fixed point p such that all the isotropy weights at p are equal to one, then the Gromov width of (N,omega) is at least one. We use holomorphic techniques to prove the upper bound.
A manifold obtained by k simultaneous symplectic blow-ups of CP^2 of equal sizes epsilon (where the size of CP^1 \subset CP^2 is one) admits an effective two dimensional torus action if k <= 3 and admits an effective circle action if (k-1)epsilon < 1. We show that these bounds are sharp if 1/epsilon is an integer.
We give an Euler Maclaurin formula with remainder for the sum of the values of a smooth function on the integral points in a simple integral polytope. This formula is proved by elementary methods.
We study torus actions on symplectic manifolds with proper moment maps in the case that each reduced space is two-dimensional. We provide a complete set of invariants for such spaces. Our proof uses sheaves of groupoids of Hamiltonian spaces.