Hamiltonian stationary cones with isotropic links
Jingyi Chen, Yu Yuan

TL;DR
This paper classifies Hamiltonian stationary isotropic surfaces in the 5-sphere, showing conditions under which they are Legendrian and minimal, and extends results to higher-dimensional isotropic submanifolds with Hamiltonian stationary cones.
Contribution
It provides a classification of Hamiltonian stationary isotropic surfaces and submanifolds in spheres, establishing when they are Legendrian and minimal based on genus and Betti number.
Findings
Genus zero surfaces are Legendrian and minimal.
Higher genus surfaces have specific Legendrian point counts.
Results extend to non-orientable links and higher dimensions.
Abstract
We show that any closed oriented immersed Hamiltonian stationary isotropic surface with genus in is (1) Legendrian and minimal if ; (2) either Legendrian or with exactly Legendrian points if In general, every compact oriented immersed isotropic submanifold such that the cone is Hamiltonian stationary must be Legendrian and minimal if its first Betti number is zero. Corresponding results for non-orientable links are also provided.
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Hamiltonian stationary cones with isotropic links
Jingyi CHEN
Department of Mathematics
University of British Columbia
Vancouver, B.C., V6T 1Z2
Canada
and
Yu YUAN
Department of Mathematics, Box 354350
University of Washington
Seattle, WA 98195
USA
Abstract.
We show that any closed oriented immersed Hamiltonian stationary isotropic surface with genus in is (1) Legendrian and minimal if ; (2) either Legendrian or with exactly Legendrian points if In general, every compact oriented immersed isotropic submanifold such that the cone is Hamiltonian stationary must be Legendrian and minimal if its first Betti number is zero. Corresponding results for non-orientable links are also provided.
The first authors is partially supported by NSERC, and the second author is partially supported by an NSF grant.
1.
Introduction
In this note we study the problem of when a Hamiltonian stationary cone with isotropic link on S^{2n-1}\ in becomes special Lagrangian. A submanifold , not necessarily a Lagrangian submanifold, is Hamiltonian stationary means
[TABLE]
where is the complex structure in and is the mean curvature vector of in . In fact this is the variational equation of volume of , when one makes an arbitrary deformation with for :
[TABLE]
The notion of Hamiltonian stationary Lagrangian submanifolds in a Kähler manifold was introduced by Oh [Oh] as critical points of the volume functional under Hamiltonian variations (known to A. Weinstein as noted in [Oh]). Chen-Morvan [CM] generalized it to the isotropic deformations.
As in Harvey-Lawson [HL], a submanifold in is isotropic at if
[TABLE]
and it is isotropic if it is isotropic for every . A submanifold being isotropic is equivalent to that the standard symplectic 2-form on vanishes on . The dimension of an isotropic submanifold is at most , the half real dimension of , and when it is the submanifold is Lagrangian.
For an immersed -dimensional submanifold in the unit sphere , let be the restriction of the coordinate functions in to . A point is Legendrian if is isotropic in and
[TABLE]
is Legendrian if all the points are Legendrian. This is equivalent to that is an -dimensional integral submanifold of the standard contact distribution on . The cone is said to have link . In this article, all links are assumed to be connected, and we shall use for 2-dimensional link .
The Hamiltonian stationary condition is a third order constrain on the submanifold , as seen when is locally written as a graph over its tangent space at a point. The minimal submanifolds, a second order constrain on the local graphical representation of , are automatically Hamiltonian stationary. We are particularly interested in the case that is a Lagrangian submanifold. The existence of (many) compact Hamiltonian stationary Lagrangian submanifolds in versus the non-existence of compact minimal submanifolds makes the study of Hamiltonian stationary ones interesting. In this note, we shall not be concerned with the existence of Hamiltonian stationary ones; instead, we shall concentrate on the rigidity property, namely, when the Hamiltonian stationary ones reduce to special Lagrangians, in the case when the submanifold is a cone over a spherical link in .
A well-known fact about a link and the cone over it is that is minimal in if and only if is minimal in . When is Hamiltonian stationary and isotropic, possibly away from the cone vertex , we observe that the Hamiltonian stationary equation for splits into two equations:
[TABLE]
i.e. the link is Hamiltonian stationary in as well, and
[TABLE]
where is the mean curvature vector of in and is the position vector of . Moreover, if the link is isotropic in , then
[TABLE]
where is the mean curvature vector of in ; in fact,
[TABLE]
as is tangent to , where is the derivative in and is an orthonormal local frame on .
Our observation is that the rigidity statements in [CY] for minimal links generalize to the Hamiltonian stationary setting.
Theorem 1.1**.**
Let be a closed oriented immersed isotropic surface with genus in such that the cone is Hamiltonian stationary away from its vertex. Then
(1) if , is Legendrian and minimal (in fact, totally geodesic);
(2) if , is either Legendrian or has exactly Legendrian points counting the multiplicity.
It is known that the immersed minimal Legendrian sphere () must be a great two sphere in (cf. [H, Theorem 2.7]). Simple isotropic tori () can be constructed so that the Hamiltonian stationary cone is nowhere Lagrangian. A family of Hamiltonian stationary (non-minimal) Lagrangian cones with are presented by Iriyeh in [I]. Bryant’s classification [Br, p.269] of minimal surfaces with constant curvature in spheres provides examples of flat Legendrian minimal tori as well as flat non-Legendrian isotropic minimal tori () in . The constructions of Haskins [H] and Haskins-Kapouleas [HK] show that there are infinitely many immersed (embedded if ) minimal Legendrian surfaces for each odd genus in .
In general dimensions and co-dimensions, we have
Theorem 1.2**.**
Let be a compact isotropic immersed oriented submanifold in the unit sphere such that the cone is Hamiltonian stationary away from its vertex. Suppose that the first Betti number of L^{m}\is [math]. Then, away from its vertex,
(1) when is the top dimension , the cone is Lagrangian and minimal (or equivalently is Legendrian and minimal);
(2) for , the cone is isotropic, and if the differential 1-form is closed then the mean curvature of vanishes on the normal subbundle .
We make two remarks when the dimension of the link is two. First, Theorem 1.2 also implies Theorem 1.1 (1). Second, if the first Betti number of is not zero () and is isotropically immersed in , with , and is Hamiltonian stationary away from its cone vertex, the same argument as in the proof of Theorem 1.1 leads to the same conclusion as in part (2) of Theorem 1.1 that the cone is isotropic either everywhere or along exactly lines.
Theorem 1.2 and Theorem 1.1 (except the totally geodesic part) remain valid for non-orientable links (note that for a compact non-orientable surface ), see Remark 2.2 and Remark 3.1. The non-orientable version of Theorem 1.2 implies that one cannot immerse a compact non-orientable with zero first Betti number Hamiltonian stationarily and isotropically into Otherwise, the cone would be a special Lagrangian cone, then would be orientable, and would also be orientable. In particular, there exists no isotropic Hamiltonian stationary immersion of a real projective sphere into
It is interesting to find out whether there exists an isotropic Hamiltonian stationary surface in with exactly Legendrian points for .
2. Hopf differentials and Proof of theorem 1.1
To measure how far the isotropic is away from being Legendrian, or the deviation of the corresponding cone from being Lagrangian, we project onto the tangent space of in where is the complex structure in Denote the length of the projection by
[TABLE]
To compute the length, we need some preparation. Locally, take an isothermal coordinate system on the isotropic surface
[TABLE]
Set the complex variable
[TABLE]
Then the induced metric has the local expression with the conformal factor
[TABLE]
We project to each of the orthonormal basis with . Then the sum of the squares of each projection is
[TABLE]
where and is the Euclidean inner product on , and in particular . In fact, is the square of the norm of the symplectic form in restricted on the cone with link :
[TABLE]
The Hamiltonian stationary condition for the cone is
[TABLE]
It follows that
[TABLE]
and
[TABLE]
Coupled with the isotropy condition
[TABLE]
we have the holomorphic condition
[TABLE]
The induced metric yields a compatible conformal structure on the oriented surface which makes a Riemann surface. We shall consider two cases according to the genus .
(1) : By the uniformization theorem for Riemann surfaces (cf. [AS, p.125, p.181]), there exists a holomorphic covering map
[TABLE]
or locally
[TABLE]
For one has
[TABLE]
where is a positive (real analytic) function on In particular
[TABLE]
Note that
[TABLE]
is a holomorphic function of , in turn it is a holomorphic function of . Also is bounded, approaching [math] as goes to because
[TABLE]
So Therefore and is Legendrian. We conclude that is Lagrangian.
The 1-form on the Lagrangian submanifold is closed. (This follows directly either from Theorem 3.4 of Dazord in [HL], or can be verified by locally exactness via the local expression
[TABLE]
given in [HL]; this will be done in next section.) Its restriction along is therefore a closed 1-form , as the pullback by the inclusion of a closed 1-form. Since the first Betti number of is zero (), there is a smooth function on such that
[TABLE]
Then
[TABLE]
As we have seen, the Hamiltonian stationary condition on implies
[TABLE]
On the closed surface then is constant, in turn, is minimal.
An immersed minimal Legendrian 2-sphere in is totally geodesic. This is a known fact, for a proof, see for example in [CY].
(2) As in the case, the isotropic and Hamiltonian stationary condition gives us a local holomorphic function and global holomorphic Hopf 1-differential . We only consider the case that is not identically The zeros of are therefore isolated and near each of the zeros, we can write
[TABLE]
where is a local holomorphic function non-vanishing at the zero point and is a positive integer. One can also view
[TABLE]
as the tangent vector
[TABLE]
along the tangent space where . The projection on the tangent space of is locally represented as
[TABLE]
The index of the globally defined vector field at each of its singular points, i.e. where , is the negative of that for the vector field Note that the index of the latter is
From the Poincaré-Hopf index theorem, for any vector field with isolated singularities on , one has
[TABLE]
The zeros of are just the Legendrian points on . So we conclude that the number of Legendrian points is counting the multiplicity. This completes the proof of Theorem 1.1.
Remark 2.1**.**
*As mentioned in the introduction, Theorem 1.1 (except the totally geodesic part) and its generalization to higher codimensions can be extended for the non-orientable links. This can be seen as follows. The Poincaré-Hopf index theorem holds on compact non-orientable surfaces, our count of the indices of the still globally defined via local holomorphic functions is valid too, and the index of a singular point of a vector field is independent of local orientations. Moreover, this index counting argument yields an alternative proof for Theorem 1.1 (1) (except the totally geodesic part) and its generalization. ***
3. Harmonic forms and Proof of Theorem 1.2
Consider an immersed isotropic Hamiltonian stationary submanifold in
[TABLE]
The isotropy condition reads for any local coordinates on
[TABLE]
with being the complex structure of and
The Hamiltonian stationary condition for the cone is
[TABLE]
Notice that and are independent of . Therefore, the equation above splits into two equations
[TABLE]
and
[TABLE]
where is the induced metric on and is the Laplace-Beltrami operator of .
To measure the deviation of the corresponding cone from being isotropic, we project onto the tangent space of in . Note that the projection is the vector field along
[TABLE]
where The corresponding 1-form
[TABLE]
is of course globally defined on . In fact it is a harmonic 1-form, because is closed and co-closed as verified as follows:
[TABLE]
and
[TABLE]
where we have used the isotropy condition and the consequence of Hamiltonian stationary condition in the last two steps, respectively.
The Hodge-de Rham theorem implies that the harmonic 1-form must vanish because the first Betti number of is zero by assumption. It follows that must vanish. Therefore, the cone is isotropic.
Next, we claim that the differential 1-form
[TABLE]
on is closed. When the isotropic cone is Lagrangian. By [HL], around each point of , there is a locally defined Lagrangian angle such that
[TABLE]
Now the globally defined 1-form on the link can be expressed locally as
[TABLE]
by noticing that as , where the second equality holds as the two 1-forms are on and the tangent vectors to are orthogonal to , and stands for the exterior differentiation on . We conclude that is a closed 1-form on . When , the 1-form is closed by assumption, so its restriction on is closed.
Since the first Betti number of is zero, there is a smooth function on such that
[TABLE]
This implies that the projection of onto satisfies
[TABLE]
where is a local orthonomal frame of . The Hamiltonian stationary condition on asserts, as we have seen earlier, that
[TABLE]
On the closed submanifold then is constant. In turn, for is minimal, and for is partially minimal, namely vanishes on the normal subbundle The proof of Theorem 1.2 is complete.
Remark 3.1**.**
As the projection and the adjoint operator is independent of the local orientations and the Hodge-de Rham theorem holds for compact non-orientable manifolds (cf. [LW, p.125–126]), we see that Theorem 1.2 remains true for non-orientable links
Remark 3.2**.**
For a surface link with for the case , if it is isotropic and is Hamiltonian stationary, the same argument as in [CY] leads to the conclusion that the second fundamental form of in vanishes in the normal subbundle . When , is totally geodesic in as noted before.***
Corollary 3.1**.**
Let be a compact immersed isotropic submanifold in the unit sphere . If the Ricci curvature of is nonnegative, and it is positive somewhere or the Euler characteristic is not zero, then the Hamiltonian stationary cone is isotropic, in particular, is Lagrangian (or equivalently is Legendrian) and minimal when is the top dimension
Under the above condition, from Bochner [B, p.381], it follows immediately that the first Betti number of is zero. Then Theorem 1.2 and its non-orientable version imply the corollary.
The reference list from the paper itself. Each links out to its DOI / PubMed record.
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- 2[B] S. Bochner, Curvature and Betti numbers , Ann. Math. 49 (1948), 379-390.
- 3[Br] R. Bryant, Minimal surfaces of constant curvature in S n superscript 𝑆 𝑛 S^{n} , Trans. Amer. Math. Soc. 290 (1985), no. 1, 259-271.
- 4[CM] B.-Y. Chen, and J.-M. Morvan, Deformations of isotropic submanifolds in Kähler manifolds. , J. Geom. Phys. 13 (1994), no. 1, 79-104.
- 5[CY] J.-Y. Chen and Y. Yuan, Minimal cones with isotropic links , Int. Math. Res. Not. 2006, Art. ID 69284, 14 pp.
- 6[D] P. Dazord, Sur la géometie des sous-fibrés et des feuilletages lagrangiense , Ann. Sci. Eć. Norm. Super., IV, Ser.13 , 465-480 (1981).
- 7[HL] R. Harvey and H.B. Lawson, Calibrated geometries , Acta Math. 148 (1982), 47-157.
- 8[H] M. Haskins, Special Lagrangian cones , Amer. J. Math. 126 (2004), no. 4, 845-871.
