English

Recovering contact forms from boundary data

Symplectic Geometry 2026-02-10 v6 Geometric Topology

Abstract

Let XX be a compact smooth manifold with boundary. The paper deals with contact 11-forms β\beta on XX, whose Reeb vector fields vβv_\beta admit Lyapunov functions ff. We tackle the question: how to recover XX and β\beta from the appropriate data along the boundary X\partial X? We describe such boundary data and prove that they allow for a reconstruction of the pair (X,β)(X, \beta), up to a diffeomorphism of XX. We use the term ``holography" for the reconstruction. We say that objects or structures inside XX are {\it holographic}, if they can be reconstructed from their vβv_\beta-flow induced ``shadows" on the boundary X\partial X. We also introduce numerical invariants that measure how ``wrinkled" the boundary X\partial X is with respect to the vβv_\beta-flow and study their holographic properties under the contact forms preserving embeddings of equidimensional contact manifolds with boundary. We get some ``non-squeezing results" about such contact embedding, which are reminiscent of Gromov's non-squeezing theorem in symplectic geometry.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2309.14604,
  title  = {Recovering contact forms from boundary data},
  author = {Gabriel Katz},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2309.14604},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

46 pages, 3 figures

R2 v1 2026-06-28T12:32:18.781Z