SPRING 2018
The talks start at 16.15 in Seminar Room NA 5/24 . 17.7.2018 Vaughn Climenhaga (Houston) “TBA” 3.7.2018 Andrea Mondino (Warwick) “Some smooth applications of non-smooth Ricci curvature lower bounds” Abstract:After a brief introduction to the synthetic notions of Ricci curvature lower bounds in terms of optimal transportation, due to Lott-Sturm-Villani, I will discuss some applications to smooth Riemannian manifolds. These include: rigidity and stability of Levy-Gromov inequality, an almost euclidean isoperimetric inequality motivated by the celebrated Perelman’s Pseudo-Locality Theorem for Ricci flow, and some geometric properties of quotients of smooth manifolds having Ricci curvature bounded below. 26.6.2018 Egor Shelukhin (Montreal) “On barcodes in symplectic topology” Abstract: We review the notions of persistence modules and their associated barcodes, and describe a few of their applications in symplectic topology. 26.6.2018 Jungsoo Kang (Seul) “A contact systolic inequality in dimension three” Abstract: We call a contact form Zoll if all of whose Reeb orbits are closed and have the same period. I will show that if a contact form on a 3-manifold is close to a Zoll one then a systolic inequality holds: the minimal period of closed Reeb orbits is bounded above by the contact volume. This yields that every Zoll contact form is a local maximizer for the systolic ratio in dimension 3. This is joint work with G. Benedetti. 19.6.2018 Gabriele Benedetti (Heidelberg) “Magnetic flows on surfaces and their curvature” Abstract: In this talk, which report on joint work with Jungsoo Kang and Luca Asselle, we discuss the role of curvature in the study of magnetic flows on surfaces. In particular, we analyse its relation with integrable flows, Zoll flows and systolic inequalities in this category. 29.5.2018 Philipp Kunde (Hamburg) “Real-analytic AbC-constructions” Abstract: Until 1970 it was an open question if there is an ergodic area-preserving smooth diffeomorphism on the disc D2. This problem was solved by the so-called Approximation by Conjugation-method developed by D. Anosov and A. Katok. In fact, on every smooth compact connected manifold of dimension m ≥ 2 admitting a non-trivial circle action this method enables the construction of C∞-diffeomorphisms of topological entropy 0 with particular ergodic, topological and spectral properties or non-standard C∞-realizations of measure-preserving systems. However, there are great challenging differences in the real-analytic case. In this talk, I will present recent attempts to extend the AbC-method to the real-analytic category in case of any torus Tm or odd-dimensional spheres. 24.4.2018 Maciej Starostka (RUB) “A one-dimensional toy model for Seiberg-Witten theory” Abstract: We introduce 1-dimensional Seiberg-Witten equations. Although they can be solved explicitely we discuss their properties. In particular we have a closer look on their variational nature, relation with vortex equations, invariance under the gauge transformation group and (non-) existence of the gradient flow. The purpose of this is to understand with what difficulties one has to deal while defining Seiberg-Witten-Floer stable homotopy type for 3-dimensional manifolds. 17.4.2018 Stephan Mescher (Leipzig) “Topological complexity of symplectic manifolds” Abstract: Topological complexity (TC) was introduced by M. Farber as a numerical homotopy invariant motivated by the motion planning problem from robotics. It bears similarity with the Lusternik-Schnirelmann category. In this talk, I will present a result from joint work with Mark Grant in which we identify a topological condition on a symplectic manifold that ensures TC to coincide with a standard dimensional upper bound. This result is the TC analogue of a theorem by Rudyak-Oprea on the Lusternik-Schnirelmann category of symplectically aspherical manifolds. After an introduction to TC and the presentation of some basic results, I will explain how the cohomology groups of a space may be used to derive lower bounds on TC. I will then outline how these bounds are combined with infinite-dimensional de Rham theory to provide the abovementioned result for symplectic manifolds. 17.4.2018 Norbert Peyerimhoff (Durham) “On Ollivier-Ricci curvature and Bonnet-Myers sharp graphs” Abstract: Ollivier-Ricci curvature is a natural curvature notion which is motivated from Riemannian Geometry and can be defined in the setting of graphs. This discrete curvature notion allows for both a discrete Bonnet-Myers and Lichnerowicz Theorem. In the smooth setting of Riemannian manifolds, Cheng’s and Obata’s Theorems state, respectively, that the Bonnet-Myers and Licherowicz inequalities hold with equality if and only if the manifold is the round sphere. A natural analogue of round spheres in the context of graphs are hypercubes. Indeed the Bonnet-Myers and Licherowicz inequalities are sharp for hypercubes. But, interestingly, the family of graphs for which the Bonnet-Myers inequality is sharp is much richer than just the hypercubes. In this talk we give a full classification of all distance regular and Bonnet-Myers sharp graphs with respect to Ollivier-Ricci curvature. This is joint work with D. Bourne, D. Cushing, P. Kamtue, J. Koolen, Sh. Liu and F. Muench. 10.4.2018 Erasmo Caponio (Bari) “On the existence of harmonic coordinates on Finsler manifolds” Abstract:
WINTER 2017/18
6.3.2018 Arnaud Maret (ETH Zurich) “Forcing relations for periodic orbits” Abstract: Periodic orbits play a leading role in the study of the dynamics of iterated transformations of a given space. This talk outlines an abstract approach to the analysis of dynamical forcing relations between periodic orbits of a fixed transformation. In other words, we present a strategy to answer the following question: "Under what conditions on a space, does the existence of some periodic orbit imply, in a general way, the existence of other orbits ?". Every periodic orbit is specified by topological properties that will serve as a base for the comparison. The expected forcing relations define a preorder on the set of such specifications. Understanding the preorder is of main interest in this context. The above framework is illustrated at its best by the Sharkovskii Theorem on interval dynamics. In dimension two, achievements have been made towards the establishment of an analogue for surface homeomorphisms. 26.1.2018 Christoph Thäle (RUB) Abstract: 16.1.2018 Marie-Claude Arnaud (Avignon) Arnol’d-Liouville theorems in low regularity Abstract: Classical Arnol’d-Liouville theorem describes precisely the dynamics of Hamiltonian systems that have enough independent C2 integrals. For such Hamiltonians, it is known that there is an invariant Lagrangian foliation that is symplectically diffeomorphic to the standard one and that the dynamics restricted to every invariant leaf is conjugate to a translation flow. Here we focus on what happens when we have lower regularity. The motivation for studying low regularity is that when a Tonelli Hamiltonian has no conjugate points, only the existence of continuous integrals can be proved. More precisely, we will raise the question of which continuous Lagrangian foliations are symplectically homeomorphic to the standard one and prove that when the integrals are just C1 and when the Hamiltonian is Tonelli, we indeed obtain a continiuous Lagrangian foliation that is symplectically homeomorphic to the standard one and that Arnol’d-Liouville theorem remains true with a symplectic homeomorphism instead of a C1 change of coordinates. 19.12.2017 Robert Krawczyk (Gdansk) Homoclinic orbits for an almost periodically Newtonian system in R^3 Abstract: We will be concerned with the existence of homoclinic solutions for a Newtonian system q ̈(t) + a(t)W (q(t)) = 0, where t ∈ R, q ∈ R^3. It is assumed that there is a line l ∈ R^3 \ {0} such that potential W ∈ C2(R^3 \ l,R) has a global maximum at the origin and the line l consists of singular points. Moreover, W satisfies the ”strong-force” condition in a neighbourhood of l and a: R → R is a continuous almost periodic function. The existence of at least two solutions will be discussed. 12.12.2017 Luis Diogo (Uppsala) Lifting Lagrangians from Donaldson-type divisors Abstract: We prove that there are infinitely many non-symplectomorphic monotone Lagrangian tori in complex projective spaces, quadrics and cubics of complex dimension at least 3. This result follows from a relation between the superpotential of a monotone Lagrangian L in a closed symplectic manifold Y and the superpotential of a Lagrangian lift of L to a closed symplectic manifold X, in which Y sits as a codimension 2 symplectic submanifold. This relation sometimes involves relative Gromov-Witten invariants of the pair (X,Y). The superpotential of a Lagrangian is a count of pseudoholomorphic disks (of Maslov index 2) with boundary on the Lagrangian, and it plays an important role in Floer theory and mirror symmetry. This is joint work with D. Tonkonog, R. Vianna and W. Wu. 12.12.2017 Christian Gloy (Hamburg) "Overtwisted contact structures in dimension three” Abstract: In this talk I will illustrate how M. Borman, Y. Eliashberg and E. Murphy proved in their fa- mous paper from 2014 that there is a parametric extension h-principle for overtwisted contact manifolds (M, ξ) in all dimensions 2n + 1. Basically, thanks to Gromov’s h-principle for (open) contact manifolds, the whole problem reduces to a local one, more specifically to an embedded annulus C = S2n × [0, 1] inside the manifold M. After partitioning C into smaller subannuli the main idea is to describe the remaining structure ξ on C by the graphs of sψ,s ∈ [0,1], for a suitable function ψ : S2n → R and achieve the loosely speaking rule: wherever ψ is positive, we can extend the contact structure over C and on regions where ψ could be negative we need to find some special holes of the structure ξ which are modelled by so called (Hamiltonian) contact shells. These shells are 2n + 1-balls BK which are essentially the region under the graph of a smooth function K : ∆ × S1 → R with K|∂∆×S1 > 0, ∆ a cylindrical domain, such that near the boundary of BK the almost contact structure ξ is completely determined by K and actually genuine contact. At this stage the notion of overtwisted discs and therefore overtwisted structures in higher dimensions comes into play and such discs will be used to fill the remaining special holes wrt. ξ with a genuine structure. It turns out that the structure we end with is indeed an overtwisted one on M. I will mainly discuss the 3−dimensional case and briefly point out where in higher dimensions more work is involved and the argument becomes more difficult. 5.12.2017 Felix Schmäschke (Berlin) On geodesic flows with symmetries and closed magnetic geodesics on orbifolds Abstract: This talk is about a joint project with Luca Asselle. In the talk I explain how the magnetic flow on any (effective) orbifold lifts to a geodesic flow on a manifold admitting an action of a compact Lie group. We use this fact to prove that under some topological condition, more precisely that the orbifold is not rationally aspherical, then there exists a closed magnetic geodesic for almost every energy. We also give an account on how our approach yields an alternative proof of the known theorem by Guruprasad and Haeflinger about the existence of closed geodesics on orbifolds. 28.11.2017 Stefano Luzzatto (ICTP, Trieste) "Physical measures for dynamical systems" Abstract: We present the Palis and Viana conjectures on the existence of physical measures, review some of the literature, and describe some recent joint work with Climenhaga and Pesin on the existence of Sinai-Ruelle-Bowen physical measures for nonuniformly hyperbolic surface diffeomorphisms. 28.11.2017 Daniel Rosen (Tel Aviv) "Dual caustics in Minkowski billiards" Abstract: Mathematical billiards are a classical and well-studied class of dynamical systems, "a mathematician’s playground". Convex caustics, which are curves to which billiard trajectories remain forever tangent, play an important role in the study of billiards. In this talk we will discuss convex caustic in Minkowski billiards, which is the generalization of classical billiards no non-Euclidean normed planes. In this case a natural duality arises from, roughly speaking, interchanging the roles of the billiard table and the unit ball of the (dual) norm. This leads to duality of caustics in Minkowski billiards. Such a pair of caustics is dual in a strong sense, and in particular they have equal perimeters and other classical parameters. We will show that, when the norm is Euclidean, every caustic possesses a dual caustic, but in general this phenomenon fails. Based on joint work with S. Artstein-Avidan, D. Florentin, and Y. Ostrover. 21.11.2017 Marco Mazzucchelli (ENS Lyon) “On the boundary rigidity problem for surfaces” Abstract: The classical boundary rigidity problem asks whether, or to what extent, the inner geometry of a compact Riemannian manifold with boundary can be determined by means of boundary measurements, such as the distance function among boundary points, or the geodesic scattering map. In my talk I will review this problem and some of the known results that are valid for "simple" Riemannian manifolds. I will then sketch the proof of some recent boundary rigidity results for non-simple Riemannian surfaces, including surfaces with trapped geodesics or with non-convex boundary. The talk is based on joint work with Colin Guillarmou and Leo Tzou. 7.11.2017 Seongchan Kim (Augsburg) J^+-like invariants and the restricted three body problem Abstract: Recently, Cieliebak-Frauenfelder-van Koert observed disasters which can happen in a family of periodic orbits in the planar circular restricted three body problem and defined new invariants of such families, based on Arnold's $J^+$-invariant. In this talk, we recall their results and determine those invariants for a distinguished class of periodic orbits in the restricted three body problem, i.e., periodic orbits of the second kind. This talk is based on a joint work with Joontae Kim. 24.10.2017 Carsten Haug (Neuchâtel) “On action selectors” Abstract: An action selector associates to every Hamiltonian function the action of one of its periodic orbits, in a continuous way. The mere existence of an action selector has many consequences in symplectic dynamics and geometry (like Gromov's non-squeezing theorem and the existence of closed orbits on energy surfaces of contact type). The first selectors were constructed for the standard symplectic vector space R^2n by Viterbo and Hofer-Zehnder, and then for (essentially) all symplectic manifolds by means of Floer homology (Schwarz, Oh, Usher). I will describe a more elementary construction of an action selector for manifolds $(M,\omega)$ with $[\omega] | \pi_2(M) = 0$, that uses only Gromov compactness. This is joint work with Alberto Abbondandolo and Felix Schlenk.