On manifolds with infinitely many fillable contact structures

We introduce the notion of asymptotically finitely generated contact structures, which states essentially that the Symplectic Homology in a certain degree of any filling of such contact manifolds is uniformly generated by only finitely many Reeb orbits. This property is used to generalize a famous result by Ustilovsky: We show that in a large class of manifolds (including all unit cotangent bundles and all Weinstein fillable contact manifolds with torsion first Chern class) each carries infinitely many exactly fillable contact structures. These are all different from the ones constructed recently by Lazarev. Along the way, the construction of Symplectic Homology is made more general. Moreover, we give a detailed exposition of Cieliebak’s Invariance Theorem for subcritical handle attaching, where we provide explicit Hamiltonians for the squeezing on the handle.

Symplectic Banach–Mazur distances between subsets of ℂn

Following proposals of Ostrover and Polterovich, we introduce and study “coarse” and “fine” versions of a symplectic Banach–Mazur distance on certain open subsets of [Formula: see text] and other open Liouville domains. The coarse version declares two such domains to be close to each other if each domain admits a Liouville embedding into a slight dilate of the other; the fine version, which is similar to the distance on subsets of cotangent bundles of surfaces recently studied by Stojisavljević and Zhang, imposes an additional requirement on the images of these embeddings that is motivated by the definition of the classical Banach–Mazur distance on convex bodies. Our first main result is that the coarse and fine distances are quite different from each other, in that there are sequences that converge coarsely to an ellipsoid but diverge to infinity with respect to the fine distance. Our other main result is that, with respect to the fine distance, the space of star-shaped domains in [Formula: see text] admits quasi-isometric embeddings of [Formula: see text] for every finite dimension [Formula: see text]. Our constructions are obtained from a general method of constructing [Formula: see text]-dimensional Liouville domains whose boundaries have Reeb dynamics determined by certain autonomous Hamiltonian flows on a given [Formula: see text]-dimensional Liouville domain. The bounds underlying our main results are proven using filtered equivariant symplectic homology via methods from [J. Gutt and M. Usher, Symplectically knotted codimension-zero embeddings between domains in [Formula: see text], Duke Math. J. 168 (2019) 2299–2363].

Two closed orbits for non-degenerate Reeb flows

We prove that every non-degenerate Reeb flow on a closed contact manifold M admitting a strong symplectic filling W with vanishing first Chern class carries at least two geometrically distinct closed orbits provided that the positive equivariant symplectic homology of W satisfies a mild condition. Under further assumptions, we establish the existence of two geometrically distinct closed orbits on any contact finite quotient of M. Several examples of such contact manifolds are provided, like displaceable ones, unit cosphere bundles, prequantisation circle bundles, Brieskorn spheres and toric contact manifolds. We also show that this condition on the equivariant symplectic homology is preserved by boundary connected sums of Liouville domains. As a byproduct of one of our applications, we prove a sort of Lusternik–Fet theorem for Reeb flows on the unit cosphere bundle of not rationally aspherical manifolds satisfying suitable additional assumptions.

Vanishing of Symplectic Homology and Obstruction to Flexible Fillability

For any asymptotically dynamically convex contact manifold $Y$, we show that $SH_{\ast }(W)=0$ is a property independent of the choice of topologically simple (i.e., $c_1(W)=0$ and $\pi _{1}(Y)\rightarrow \pi _1(W)$ is injective) Liouville filling $W$. In particular, if $Y$ is the boundary of a flexible Weinstein domain, then any topologically simple Liouville filling $W$ has vanishing symplectic homology. As a consequence, we answer a question of Lazarev partially: a contact manifold $Y$ admitting flexible fillings determines the integral cohomology of all the topologically simple Liouville fillings of $Y$. The vanishing result provides an obstruction to flexible fillability. As an application, we show that all Brieskorn manifolds of dimension $\ge 5$ cannot be filled by flexible Weinstein manifolds.

On the filtered symplectic homology of prequantization bundles

We study Reeb dynamics on prequantization circle bundles and the filtered (equivariant) symplectic homology of prequantization line bundles, aka negative line bundles, with symplectically aspherical base. We define (equivariant) symplectic capacities, obtain an upper bound on their growth, prove uniform instability of the filtered symplectic homology and touch upon the question of stable displacement. We also introduce a new algebraic structure on the positive (equivariant) symplectic homology capturing the free homotopy class of a closed Reeb orbit — the linking number filtration — and use it to give a new proof of the non-degenerate case of the contact Conley conjecture (i.e. the existence of infinitely many simple closed Reeb orbits), not relying on contact homology.