English

The canonical lamination calibrated by a cohomology class

Differential Geometry 2026-01-19 v4 Geometric Topology

Abstract

Let MM be a closed oriented Riemannian manifold of dimension 2d72 \leq d \leq 7, and let ρHd1(M,R)\rho \in H^{d - 1}(M, \mathbb R) have unit norm. We construct a lamination λρ\lambda_\rho whose leaves are exactly the minimal hypersurfaces which are calibrated by every calibration in ρ\rho. The geometry of λρ\lambda_\rho is closely related to the the geometry of the unit ball of the stable norm on Hd1(M,R)H_{d - 1}(M, \mathbb R), and so we deduce several results constraining the geometry of the stable norm ball in terms of the topology of MM. These results establish a close analogy between the stable norm on Hd1(M,R)H_{d - 1}(M, \mathbb R) and the earthquake norm on the tangent space to Teichm\"uller space.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2412.00255,
  title  = {The canonical lamination calibrated by a cohomology class},
  author = {Aidan Backus},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2412.00255},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

27 pages; this is the journal version; comments welcome