English

Morse-Bott Volume Forms

Differential Geometry 2025-08-26 v2 Dynamical Systems

Abstract

A Morse-Bott volume form on a manifold is a top-degree form which vanishes along a non-degenerate critical submanifold. We prove that two such forms are diffeomorphic (by a diffeomorphism fixed on the submanifold) provided that their relative cohomology classes with respect to the submanifold coincide. For a zero submanifold of codimension at least 2, this means that two Morse-Bott volume forms with the same zero set are diffeomorphic if and only if they have equal total volumes. We show how "Moser's trick" for establishing equivalence of non-degenerate volume forms can be adapted to this setting.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2503.00541,
  title  = {Morse-Bott Volume Forms},
  author = {Luke Volk and Boris Khesin},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2503.00541},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

13 pages, 1 figure; added comment on non-orientable case