English

ECH capacities and the Ruelle invariant

Symplectic Geometry 2022-02-01 v3

Abstract

The ECH capacities are a sequence of real numbers associated to any symplectic four-manifold, which are monotone with respect to symplectic embeddings. It is known that for a compact star-shaped domain in R^4, the ECH capacities asymptotically recover the volume of the domain. We conjecture, with a heuristic argument, that generically the error term in this asymptotic formula converges to a constant determined by a "Ruelle invariant" which measures the average rotation of the Reeb flow on the boundary. Our main result is a proof of this conjecture for a large class of toric domains. As a corollary, we obtain a general obstruction to symplectic embeddings of open toric domains with the same volume. For more general domains in R^4, we bound the error term with an improvement on the previously known exponent from 2/5 to 1/4.

Cite

@article{arxiv.1910.08260,
  title  = {ECH capacities and the Ruelle invariant},
  author = {Michael Hutchings},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1910.08260},
  year   = {2022}
}

Comments

v3: updated references, to appear in J. Fixed Point Theory and Applications

R2 v1 2026-06-23T11:47:31.111Z