Álvaro Pelayo

Semitoric integrable systems on symplectic 4-manifolds

Let (M,ω) be a symplectic 4-manifold. A semitoric integrable system on (M,ω) is a pair of smooth functions J,H∈C ∞(M,ℝ) for which J generates a Hamiltonian S1-action and the Poisson brackets {J,H} vanish. We shall introduce new global symplectic invariants for these systems; some of these invariants encode topological or geometric aspects, while others encode analytical information about the singularities and how they stand with respect to the system. Our goal is to prove that a semitoric system is completely determined by the invariants we introduce.

Symplectic theory of completely integrable Hamiltonian systems

This paper explains the recent developments on the symplectic theory of Hamiltonian completely integrable systems on symplectic 4-manifolds, compact or not. One fundamental ingredient of these developments has been the understanding of singular affine structures. These developments make use of results obtained by many authors in the second half of the twentieth century, notably Arnold, Duistermaat and Eliasson, of which we also give a concise survey. As a motivation, we present a collection of remarkable results proven in the early and mid 1980s in the theory of Hamiltonian Lie group actions by Atiyah, Guillemin-Sternberg and Delzant among others, and which inspired many people, including the authors, to work on more general Hamiltonian systems. The paper concludes discussing a spectral conjecture for quantum integrable systems.

Fixed points of symplectic periodic flows

The study of fixed points is a classical subject in geometry and dynamics. If the circle acts in a Hamiltonian fashion on a compact symplectic manifold M, then it is classically known that there are at least 1 + dim(M)/2 fixed points; this follows from Morse theory for the momentum map of the action. In this paper we use Atiyah-Bott-Berline-Vergne (ABBV) localization in equivariant cohomology to prove that this conclusion also holds for symplectic circle actions with non-empty fixed sets, as long as the Chern class map is somewhere injective -- the Chern class map assigns to a fixed point the sum of the action weights at the point. We complement this result with less sharp lower bounds on the number of fixed points, under no assumptions; from a dynamical systems viewpoint, our results imply that there is no symplectic periodic flow with exactly one or two equilibrium points on a compact manifold of dimension at least eight.

Reduced phase space and toric variety coordinatizations of Delzant spaces

In this note we describe the natural coordinatizations of a Delzant space defined as a reduced phase space (symplectic geometry view-point) and give explicit formulas for the coordinate transformations. For each fixed point of the torus action on the Delzant polytope, we have a maximal coordinatization of an open cell in the Delzant space which contains the fixed point. This cell is equal to the domain of definition of one of the natural coordinatizations of the Delzant space as a toric variety (complex algebraic geometry view-point), and we give an explicit formula for the toric variety coordinates in terms of the reduced phase space coordinates. We use considerations in the maximal coordinate neighborhoods to give simple proofs of some of the basic facts about the Delzant space, as a reduced phase space, and as a toric variety. These can be viewed as a first application of the coordinatizations, and serve to make the presentation more self-contained.

Hofer's question on intermediate symplectic capacities

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}. We deduce that there are no intermediate capacities, between 1-capacities, first constructed by Gromov in 1985, and n-capacities, answering another question of Hofer. In 2008, Guth reached the same conclusion under the additional hypothesis that the intermediate capacities should satisfy the exhaustion property.

Hamiltonian Dynamics and Spectral Theory for Spin–Oscillators

We study the Hamiltonian dynamics and spectral theory of spin-oscillators. Because of their rich structure, spin-oscillators display fairly general properties of integrable systems with two degrees of freedom. Spin-oscillators have infinitely many transversally elliptic singularities, exactly one elliptic-elliptic singularity and one focus-focus singularity. The most interesting dynamical features of integrable systems, and in particular of spin-oscillators, are encoded in their singularities. In the first part of the paper we study the symplectic dynamics around the focus-focus singularity. In the second part of the paper we quantize the coupled spin-oscillators systems and study their spectral theory. The paper combines techniques from semiclassical analysis with differential geometric methods.

Fiber connectivity and bifurcation diagrams of almost toric integrable systems

This paper develops a symplectic bifurcation theory for integrable systems in dimension four. We prove that if an integrable system has no hyperbolic singularities and its bifurcation diagram has no vertical tangencies, then the fibers of the induced singular Lagrangian fibration are connected. The image of this singular Lagrangian fibration is, up to smooth deformations, a planar region bounded by the graphs of two continuous functions. The bifurcation diagram consists of the boundary points in this image plus a countable collection of rank zero singularities, which are contained in the interior of the image. Because it recently has become clear to the mathematics and mathematical physics communities that the bifurcation diagram of an integrable system provides the best framework to study symplectic invariants, this paper provides a setting for studying quantization questions, and spectral theory of quantum integrable systems.

Semiclassical quantization and spectral limits of ħ-pseudodifferential and Berezin–Toeplitz operators

We introduce a minimalistic notion of semiclassical quantization and use it to prove that the convex hull of the semiclassical spectrum of a quantum system given by a collection of commuting operators converges to the convex hull of the spectrum of the associated classical system. This gives a quick alternative solution to the isospectrality problem for quantum toric systems. If the operators are uniformly bounded, the convergence is uniform. Analogous results hold for non-commuting operators.

Moduli spaces of toric manifolds

We construct a distance on the moduli space of symplectic toric manifolds of dimension four. Then we study some basic topological properties of this space, in particular, path-connectedness, compactness, and completeness. The construction of the distance is related to the Duistermaat–Heckman measure and the Hausdorff metric. While the moduli space, its topology and metric, may be constructed in any dimension, the tools we use in the proofs are four-dimensional, and hence so is our main result.

Semiclassical Inverse Spectral Theory for Singularities of Focus–Focus Type

We prove, assuming that the Bohr–Sommerfeld rules hold, that the joint spectrum near a focus–focus singular value of a quantum integrable system determines the classical Lagrangian foliation around the full focus–focus leaf. The result applies, for instance, to ħ-pseudodifferential operators on cotangent bundles and Berezin–Toeplitz operators on prequantizable compact symplectic manifolds.