Related papers: The Hofer conjecture on embedding symplectic ellip…
This paper calculates the function $c(a)$ whose value at $a$ is the infimum of the size of a ball that contains a symplectic image of the ellipsoid $E(1,a)$. (Here $a \ge 1$ is the ratio of the area of the large axis to that of the smaller…
In this note we consider the following conjecture: given any closed symplectic manifold $M$, there is a sufficiently small real positive number $\rho$ such that the open ball of radius $\rho$ in the Hofer metric centered at the identity on…
As has been known since the time of Gromov's Nonsqueezing Theorem, symplectic embedding questions lie at the heart of symplectic geometry. After surveying some of the most important ways of measuring the size of a symplectic set, these…
Roughly twenty five years ago Hofer asked: can the cylinder B^2(1) \times \mathbb{R}^{2(n-1)} be symplectically embedded into B^{2(n-1)}(R) \times \mathbb{R}^2 for some R>0? We show that this is the case if R \geq \sqrt{2^{n-1}+2^{n-2}-2}.…
This note describes a correct way to perform the inflation procedures claimed in the papers on embedding ellipsoids, Journ. Top. 2 (2009), 1-22 and 589-623. The idea is to inflate along a collection of transversally and positively…
We prove that if a Hamiltonian diffeomorphism of a closed monotone symplectic manifold with semisimple quantum homology has more contractible fixed points, counted homologically, than the total dimension of the homology of the manifold,…
Recently, McDuff and Schlenk determined the function c_{EB}(a) whose value at a is the infimum of the size of a 4-ball into which the ellipsoid E(1,a) symplectically embeds (here, a >= 1 is the ratio of the area of the large axis to that of…
In this paper we construct analogues of Ekeland-Hofer and Hofer-Zehnder symplectic capacities based on a class of Hamiltonian boundary value problems motivated by Clarke's and Ekeland's work, and study generalizations of some important…
Define a "Liouville domain" to be a compact exact symplectic manifold with contact-type boundary. We use embedded contact homology to assign to each four-dimensional Liouville domain (or subset thereof) a sequence of real numbers, which we…
We show that many toric domains $X$ in $R^4$ admit symplectic embeddings $\phi$ into dilates of themselves which are knotted in the strong sense that there is no symplectomorphism of the target that takes $\phi(X)$ to $X$. For instance $X$…
Given two four-dimensional symplectic manifolds, together with knots in their boundaries, we define an ``anchored symplectic embedding'' to be a symplectic embedding, together with a two-dimensional symplectic cobordism between the knots…
In determining when a four-dimensional ellipsoid can be symplectically embedded into a ball, McDuff and Schlenk found an infinite sequence of "ghost" obstructions that generate an infinite "ghost staircase" determined by the even index…
Embedded contact homology (ECH) is a kind of Floer homology for contact three-manifolds. Taubes has shown that ECH is isomorphic to a version of Seiberg-Witten Floer homology (and both are conjecturally isomorphic to a version of Heegaard…
In this paper we obtain new obstructions to symplectic embeddings of the four-dimensional polydisk $P(a,1)$ into the ball $B(c)$ for $2\leq a<\frac{\sqrt{7}-1} {\sqrt{7}-2} \approx 2.549$, extending work done by Hind-Lisi and Hutchings.…
A striking result of McDuff and Schlenk asserts that in determining when a four-dimensional symplectic ellipsoid can be symplectically embedded into a four-dimensional symplectic ball, the answer is governed by an "infinite staircase"…
We compare Hofer's geometries on two spaces associated with a closed symplectic manifold M. The first space is the group of Hamiltonian diffeomorphisms. The second space L consists of all Lagrangian submanifolds of $M \times M$ which are…
We show that if (M,\omega) is a closed symplectic manifold which admits a nontrivial Hamiltonian vector field all of whose contractible closed orbits are constant, then Hofer's metric on the group of Hamiltonian diffeomorphisms of…
We prove the elementary but surprising fact that the Hofer distance between two closed subsets of a symplectic manifold can be expressed in terms of the restrictions of Hamiltonians to one of the subsets; this helps explain certain…
In this paper, we treat an open problem related to the number of periodic orbits of Hamiltonian diffeomorphisms on closed symplectic manifolds. Hofer-Zehnder conjecture states that a Hamiltonian diffeomorphisms has infinitely many periodic…
In an earlier paper we explained how to convert the problem of symplectically embedding one 4-dimensional ellipsoid into another into the problem of embedding a certain set of disjoint balls into \CP^2 by using a new way to desingularize…