A Brunn-Minkowski type inequality for extended symplectic capacities of convex domains and length estimate for a class of billiard trajectories
Rongrong Jin, Guangcun Lu

TL;DR
This paper extends a key inequality in symplectic geometry to broader capacities of convex domains and establishes new length estimates for a class of non-periodic billiard trajectories within these domains.
Contribution
It generalizes the Brunn-Minkowski inequality for symplectic capacities and introduces length estimates for non-periodic billiard trajectories in convex domains.
Findings
Extended the Brunn-Minkowski inequality to new symplectic capacities.
Proved length estimates for non-periodic billiard trajectories.
Established parallels between periodic and non-periodic billiard results.
Abstract
In this paper, we firstly generalize the Brunn-Minkowski type inequality for Ekeland-Hofer-Zehnder symplectic capacity of bounded convex domains established by Artstein-Avidan-Ostrover in 2008 to extended symplectic capacities of bounded convex domains constructed by authors based on a class of Hamiltonian non-periodic boundary value problems recently. Then we introduce a class of non-periodic billiards in convex domains, and for them we prove some corresponding results to those for periodic billiards in convex domains obtained by Artstein-Avidan-Ostrover in 2012.
Peer Reviews
No public reviews on file for this paper yet. If you reviewed it on a platform where reviews are public (OpenReview, ICLR, NeurIPS, ICML), you can paste yours below so the community can read it here.
Videos
No videos yet. Explain this paper in a talk, walkthrough, or lecture? Add one.
A Brunn-Minkowski type inequality for extended symplectic capacities
of convex domains and length estimate for a class of billiard trajectories
Rongrong Jin and Guangcun Lu Corresponding author Partially supported by the NNSF 11271044 of China. 2010 Mathematics Subject Classification. 53D35, 53C23 (primary), 70H05, 37J05, 57R17 (secondary). Key words and phrases. Extended Ekeland-Hofer-Zehnder symplectic capacities, Brunn-Minkowski type inequality, non-periodic billiards, convex domains.
(February 23, 2023)
Abstract
In this paper, we firstly generalize the Brunn-Minkowski type inequality for Ekeland-Hofer-Zehnder symplectic capacity of bounded convex domains established by Artstein-Avidan-Ostrover in 2008 to extended symplectic capacities of bounded convex domains constructed by authors based on a class of Hamiltonian non-periodic boundary value problems recently. Then we introduce a class of non-periodic billiards in convex domains, and for them we prove some corresponding results to those for periodic billiards in convex domains obtained by Artstein-Avidan-Ostrover in 2012.
Contents
-
1.1 A Brunn-Minkowski type inequality for -capacity of convex bodies
-
1.2 Length estimate for a class of non-periodic billiard trajectories in convex domains
-
4 Classification of -billiard trajectories and related properties of proper trajectories
1 Introduction and main results
Throughout this paper, a compact, convex subset of with nonempty interior is called a convex body in . The set of all convex bodies in is denoted by . As usual, a domain in means a connected open subset of . For and let be the open ball centered at of radius in , and , . We always use to denote standard complex structure on , and without confusions. With the linear coordinates on it is given by the matrix
[TABLE]
where denotes the identity matrix of order . We also use and to denote the set of invertible real matrix and orthogonal real matrix of order , respectively.
For a convex body containing [math] in its interior, let
[TABLE]
be the Minkowski functional of and let
[TABLE]
be the support function of . The polar body of is defined by . Then ([15, Theorem 1.7.6]). For two convex bodies containing [math] in their interiors and a real number , there exists a unique convex body with support function
[TABLE]
([15, Theorem 1.7.1]). is called the -sum of and by Firey (cf. [15, (6.8.2)]).
For any two convex bodies containing [math] in their interiors, Artstein-Avidan and Ostrover [2] proved that their Ekeland-Hofer-Zehnder symplectic capacities satisfy the following Brunn-Minkowski type inequality
[TABLE]
As applications, Artstein-Avidan and Ostrover [3] used them to derive several very interesting bounds and inequalities for the length of the shortest periodic billiard trajectory in a smooth convex body in .
Recently, we established extended versions of Ekeland-Hofer and Hofer-Zehnder symplectic capacities in [13] 111The preprint was split into two papers, which were submitted independently. The present paper is one of them, mainly consisting of contents in Sections 8, 9 of [13]., which are not symplectic capacities in general. For the reader’s convenience, we recall the definition of the extended Hofer-Zehnder symplectic capacities with respect to symplectomorphisms on symplectic manifolds (Definition 2.1) and also some related properties in Section 2. In particular, for given and such that , we constructed the extended versions of Ekeland-Hofer capacity and Hofer-Zehnder capacity relative to , denoted respectively by
[TABLE]
If , then and . As the Ekeland-Hofer and Hofer-Zehnder symplectic capacities, and agree on any convex body . In this case we denote
[TABLE]
and refer to it as extended Ekeland-Hofer-Zehnder capacity of . Because of these, it is natural to generalize work by Artstein-Avidan and Ostrover [2] and [3]. The precise versions will be stated in the following two subsections, respectively.
1.1 A Brunn-Minkowski type inequality for -capacity of convex bodies
Here is the first main result of this paper.
Theorem 1.1**.**
Let be two convex bodies containing [math] in their interiors. Then for any and any real it holds that
[TABLE]
Moreover, the equality in (1.3) holds if and satisfy the condition:
[TABLE]
When the condition (1.4) is also necessary for the equality in (1.3) holding.
Readers can refer to Definition 2.7 for the concept of -carriers for a convex body. Theorem 1.1 has some interesting corollaries, see Section 3.2.
1.2 Length estimate for a class of non-periodic billiard trajectories in convex domains
Using the inequality (1.2) and its corollaries Artstein-Avidan and Ostrover [3] studied the length estimates of the shortest periodic billiard trajectory in a smooth convex body in and obtained some very interesting results. Since the Ekeland-Hofer capacity of a smooth convex body is equal to the minimum of absolute values of actions of closed characteristics on the boundary , and we generalized this relation to our extended Ekeland-Hofer-Zehnder capacity and -characteristics on in [13], it is natural using Theorem 1.1 or Corollaries 3.5, 3.6 to study corresponding conclusions for some non-periodic billiard trajectory in a smooth convex body in , which motivates the following definitions.
Definition 1.2**.**
For a convex body with boundary of class and , a nonconstant, continuous, and piecewise path with is called an -billiard trajectory in if there exists a finite set such that on and the following conditions are also satisfied:
(ABi)
and .
(ABii)
For each , fulfils the equation
[TABLE]
(So for each , that is, is constant on .) Let
[TABLE]
If (resp. ) let (resp. ) be the unique vector satisfying
[TABLE]
(resp.
[TABLE]
(ABiii)
If then
[TABLE]
(ABiv)
If and , then either (1.9) holds, or
[TABLE]
(ABv)
If and , then either (1.9) holds, or
[TABLE]
(ABvi)
If , then either (1.9) or (1.10) or (1.11) holds, or
[TABLE]
Remark 1.3**.**
(i)
For each , (1.5) is a reflection condition which describes the motion of a billiard when arriving at the boundary of the billiard table.
(ii)
Roughly speaking, -billiard trajectory requires a billiard trajectory to satisfy boundary conditions for starting position and ending position, as well as for starting velocity and ending velocity. If , an -billiard trajectory becomes periodic (or closed). In this case, and (ABiv) and (ABv) do not occur. If (ABiii) holds then all bounce times of this periodic billiard trajectory consist of elements of . If and either (1.9) or (1.12) holds then the periodic billiard trajectory is tangent to at , and so the set of its bounce times is also . When and either (1.10) or (1.11) holds, it follows from (1.7)-(1.8) that
[TABLE]
When , the set of all bounce times of this periodic billiard trajectory is . When , the set of all bounce times of this periodic billiard trajectory is (because [math] and are identified).
(iii)
If , an -billiard trajectory in might not be periodic even if since the starting velocity and ending velocity may not satisfy the condition for periodic billiard trajectory.
The existence of -billiard trajectories in will be studied in other places.
Definition 1.2 can be generalized to convex domain with non-smooth boundary. Recall that for a convex body and
[TABLE]
is the normal cone to at . is called an outward support vector of at . It is unique if is a smooth point of . Corresponding to the generalized periodic billiard trajectory introduced by Ghomi [9], we have the following generalized version of the billiard trajectory in Definition 1.2.
Definition 1.4**.**
For a convex body in and , a generalized -billiard trajectory in is defined to be a finite sequence of points in
[TABLE]
with the following properties:
(AGBi)
and .
(AGBii)
Both and are sequences of distinct points.
(AGBiii)
For every ,
[TABLE]
is an outward support vector of at .
(AGBiv)
If then
[TABLE]
(AGBv)
If and , then either (1.13) holds or there exists a unit vector such that
[TABLE]
(AGBvi)
If and , then either (1.13) holds or there exists a unit vector such that
[TABLE]
(AGBvii)
If , then either (1.13) or (1.14) or (1.15) holds, or there exist unit vectors such that
[TABLE]
Remark 1.5**.**
(i)
It is easily checked that a generalized -billiard trajectory in is exactly a generalized periodic billiard trajectory in the sense of [9].
(ii)
For a smooth convex body in and , a nonconstant, continuous, and piecewise path with is an -billiard trajectory in with if and only if the sequence
[TABLE]
is a generalized -billiard trajectory in .
In order to study -billiard via extended Ekeland-Hofer-Zehnder capacity, we will define -billiard trajectory for and convex domians and , following the idea in [3] which defines closed -billiard trajectory.
Suppose that ** and are two smooth convex bodies containing the origin in their interiors**. Then is a smooth manifold with corners in the standard symplectic space . Note that . Since , we have
[TABLE]
Moreover, for there holds
[TABLE]
Define
[TABLE]
It is well-known that every induces a natural linear symplectomorphism
[TABLE]
where is the transpose of .
Definition 1.6**.**
Let , and let and be two smooth convex bodies containing the origin in their interiors. A continuous and piecewise smooth map with is called an -billiard trajectory if
(BT1)
for some positive constant it holds that on ;
(BT2)
has a right derivative at any and a left derivative at any , and belong to
[TABLE]
with .
Remark 1.7**.**
(i)
Every -billiard trajectory is a generalized -characteristic on in the sense of Definition 2.4(ii). In fact, we only need to note that for there holds
[TABLE]
and for there holds
[TABLE]
(ii)
For a given , we can generalize Definition 1.6 to smooth convex bodies and satisfying
[TABLE]
(which not necessarily contain the origin in their interiors). In this case, a continuous and piecewise smooth map is said to be an -billiard trajectory if there exists and such that is an -billiard trajectory in the sense of Definition 1.6. (Here is the composition of and the affine linear symplectomorphism
[TABLE]
which commutes with .) The condition (1.19) insures that
[TABLE]
so that is well defined and we can associate the lengths of -billiard trajectories with it.
Corresponding to the classification for closed -trajectories in [3] we introduce:
Definition 1.8**.**
Let , and satisfy (1.19). An -billiard trajectory is called proper (resp. gliding) if is a finite set (resp. , i.e., completely).**
For and convex bodies and satisfying (1.19), we define
[TABLE]
If then becomes defined in [3, page 177]. Clearly, if both are well-defined and and .
In Section 4, based on studies on the above several classes of billiard trajectories we show in Proposition 4.4 that provides a positive lower bound for infimum of length of -billiard trajectories in . Therefore it is important to study properties of and more general . As in the proof of [3, Theorem 1.1] using Corollary 3.5 we may derive the following Brunn-Minkowski type inequality for , which is the second main result of this paper.
Theorem 1.9**.**
For , suppose that convex bodies and satisfy , and . Then
[TABLE]
and the equality holds if there exist -carriers for and which coincide up to dilation and translation by elements in .
When and , this result was first proved in [3], and Irie also gave a new proof in [12].
In order to estimate , for a symplectic matrix we define
[TABLE]
where . The set of zeros of in is a nonempty finite set ([13, Lemma A.1]) and
[TABLE]
by [13, (1.28)]. In particular, if then ([13, Lemma A.1]) and (1.24) becomes . Since for , by [13, Lemma A.5], is equal to the smallest zero in of the function
[TABLE]
(It must exist!) Moreover, if is an orthogonal matrix similar to one of form [13, (A.2)], i.e.,
[TABLE]
where and , then
[TABLE]
The width of a convex body is the thickness of the narrowest slab which contains , i.e., , where . Let
[TABLE]
Proposition 1.10**.**
Let and a convex body satisfy .
(i)
If contains a ball with , then
[TABLE]
(ii)
For any , and any such that let
[TABLE]
that is, the composition of translation and defined by (1.17), then
[TABLE]
Moreover, the right-side is equal to if , and to if and .
By Proposition 4.4 and (1.30) we immediately get our third main result.
Theorem 1.11**.**
For and a smooth convex body with , if contains a ball with then it holds that
[TABLE]
Recall that the inradius of a convex body is the radius of the largest ball contained in , i.e., . For any centrally symmetric convex body , Artstein-Avidan, Karasev, and Ostrover recently proved in [4, Theorem 1.7]:
[TABLE]
As a consequence of this and (1.33) we obtain:
Corollary 1.12** (Ghomi [9]).**
Every periodic billiard trajectory in a centrally symmetric convex body has length .
Proof.
Since for , from the first inequality in (1.30) and (1.34) we deduce
[TABLE]
When is smooth, since is equal to the length of the shortest periodic billiard trajectory in (see the bottom of [3, page 177]), we get . (In this case another new proof of [9, Theorem 1.2] was also given by Irie [12, Theorem 1.9].) For general case we may approximate by a smooth convex body such that is also periodic billiard trajectory . Thus because of monotonicity of . ∎
Remark 1.13**.**
(i)
Corollary 1.12 only partially recover [9, Theorem 1.2] by Ghomi. [9, Theorem 1.2] did not require to be centrally symmetric. It also stated that for some if and only if .
(ii)
When we may take in (1.33), and get a weaker result than Corollary 1.12: for every periodic billiard trajectory in .
(iii)
In order to get a corresponding result for each -billiard trajectory in as in Corollary 1.12, an analogue of (1.35) is needed. Hence we expect that (1.34) has the following generalization:
[TABLE]
For a bounded domain with smooth boundary, there exist positive constants , only depending on , independent of , and (possibly different) periodic billiard trajectories , , in such that their length satistfies
[TABLE]
where is the inradius of , i.e., the radius of the largest ball contained in . If is a smooth convex body , Artstein-Avidan and Ostrover [3] recently obtained the following more concrete estimates than (1.39) and (1.37):
[TABLE]
where is a positive constant independent of .
Remark 1.14**.**
Since for , from (1.32) we recover (1.40) as follows
[TABLE]
because by [16, (1.2)]. **
Finally, we have an improvement for (1.38) in the case that is a smooth convex body.
Theorem 1.15**.**
For a smooth convex body , suppose that periodic billiard trajectories in include projections to of periodic gliding billiard trajectories in . Then
[TABLE]
for some periodic billiard trajectory in .
Organization of the paper. Section 3 proves Theorem 1.1 and Corollaries 3.5, 3.6. In Section 4 we give the classification of -billiard trajectories and studied related properties of proper trajectories. Theorems 1.9, 1.15 and Proposition 1.10 will be proved In Section 5.
Acknowledgments. We are deeply grateful to the anonymous referees for giving very helpful comments and suggestions to improve the exposition.
2 The extended Hofer-Zehnder symplectic capacities
For convenience we review the extended Hofer-Zehnder symplectic capacities and related results in [13]. Given a symplectic manifold and a symplectomorphism , let be an open subset such that . Denote by the set of smooth functions satisfying
(i)
there exists a nonempty open subset (depending on ) such that and ,
(ii)
there exists a compact subset (depending on ) such that ,
(iii)
.
Denote by the Hamiltonian vector field defined by . Note that for , the condition ensures that there exists a constant solution to the Hamiltonian boundary value problem
[TABLE]
We call -admissible if all solutions to the Hamiltonian boundary value problem (2.1) with are constant. The set of all such -admissible Hamiltonians is denoted by . In [13] we defined the following analogue (or extended version) of the Hofer-Zehnder capacity of .
Definition 2.1**.**
For open subset in symplectic manifold and symplectomorphism , define
[TABLE]
Clearly If then for any open subset , where is the Hofer-Zehnder capacity defined in [10].
The following proposition lists some basic properties of the extended Hofer-Zehnder capacity. In this paper, the standard symplectic structure on is given by with linear coordinates . Let denote the set of symplectic matrix of order . Each symplectic matrix is identified with the linear symplectomorphism on which has the representing matrix under the standard symplectic basis of , , where the -th(resp. -th) coordinate of (resp. ) is and other coordinates are zero.
Proposition 2.2** ([13, Proposition 1.2]).**
(i)
(Conformality.)* for any , and for any .*
(ii)
(Monotonicity.)* Suppose that . If there exists a symplectic embedding of codimension zero such that , then for open subsets with and , it holds that .*
(iii)
(Inner regularity.)* For any precompact open subset with , we have*
[TABLE]
(iv)
(Continuity.)* For a bounded convex domain , suppose that satisfies . Then for every there exists some such that for all bounded convex domain intersecting with , it holds that*
[TABLE]
provided that and have the Hausdorff distance .
Remark 2.3**.**
(i)
The two symplectomorphisms () involved in the above monotonicity property are different in general.
(ii)
By the above mononicity property, for any and any open subset with , there holds
[TABLE]
In particular, denote , i.e., the set of stabilizers at for the adjoint action on . Then for any there holds
[TABLE]
That is to say, unlike the Hofer-Zehnder capacity which is invariant under the action of , the extended Hofer-Zehnder capacity is only invariant under the action of a subgroup of related to .
(iii)
For and any open set in , (i)-(ii) of Proposition 2.2 implies
[TABLE]
In [2], a key for the proof of the inequality (1.2) is the representation theorem for Ekeland-Hofer and Hofer-Zehnder capacity of convex bodies ([10], [7, 8, 17]). To present such a representation theorem for given in [13], which is crucial for the proof of Theorem 1.1, we recall the concept of characteristic on hypersurfaces in symplectic manifolds.
Definition 2.4** ([13, Definition 1.1]).**
(i) For a smooth hypersurface in a symplectic manifold and , a embedding from (for some ) into is called a -characteristic on if
[TABLE]
where is the characteristic line bundle given by
[TABLE]
Clearly, is a -characteristic, and for any the embedding is also a -characteristic.
(ii) If is the boundary of a convex body in , corresponding to the definition of closed characteristics on in Definition 1 of [6, Chap.V,§1] we say a nonconstant absolutely continuous curve (for some ) to be a generalized characteristic on if
[TABLE]
where
[TABLE]
is the normal cone to at . If satisfies for in addition, then we call a generalized -characteristic on . For a generalized characteristic , define its action by
[TABLE]
where is the standard inner product on . **
Remark 2.5**.**
If in (ii) is also then generalized -characteristics on are -characteristics up to reparameterization.
As a generalization of the representation theorem for Ekeland-Hofer and Hofer-Zehnder capacity of convex bodies ([10], [7, 8, 17]), we have:
Theorem 2.6** ([13, Theorem 1.8]).**
Let and let be a convex bounded domain with boundary and contain a fixed point of . Then there is a generalized -characteristic on such that
[TABLE]
If is of class , (2.5) and (2.6) become
[TABLE]
Definition 2.7**.**
A generalized -characteristic on satisfying (2.5)–(2.6) is called a -carrier for .
3 Proofs of Theorem 1.1 and Corollaries
3.1 Proof of Theorem 1.1
The basic proof ideas are similar to those of [2]. For , let be the eigenvector space which belongs to eigenvalue of and be the orthogonal complement of with respect to the standard Euclidean inner product in . For , let
[TABLE]
which is a subspace of . Since the functional
[TABLE]
is and for any with , we deduce that
[TABLE]
is a regular submanifold.
Recall that for convex body , is the support function (see the beginning in Section 1.1). If contains [math] in its interior, then is the associated Minkowski function. is the Legendre transform of .
Remark 3.1**.**
(i)
By the homogeneity of and , there exist constants such that
[TABLE]
(ii)
For , let , denote by the Legendre transform of . Then there holds
[TABLE]
In particular, we obtain that and the support function have the following relation:
[TABLE]
In fact, we can compute directly as follows:
[TABLE]
To prove Theorem 1.1, we need the following representation for for convex body and , which is a generalization of [2, Proposition 2.1].
Proposition 3.2**.**
For and , there holds
[TABLE]
Proposition 3.2 is derived based on the following Lemma. For the case , it is proved in [2, Proposition 2.2].
Lemma 3.3**.**
For , there holds
[TABLE]
We firstly give the proof of Lemma 3.3 and Proposition 3.2. The proof of Theorem 1.1 is given in the final part of this section.
Proof of Lemma 3.3.
Define
[TABLE]
Then is convex. If is strictly convex with -smooth boundary then is a functional with derivative given by
[TABLE]
By Theorem 2.6, in order to prove (3.4) we only need to show that
[TABLE]
We will prove this in four steps.
Step 1. * is positive. * It is easy to prove that
[TABLE]
for some constant . So for any we have
[TABLE]
and thus , where . Let be as in (3.1). These lead to
[TABLE]
Step 2. *There exists such that , i.e. the infimum of on can be attained by some . * Let be a sequence satisfying . Then there exists a constant such that
[TABLE]
By (3.6) and the fact that , we deduce that is bounded in . Note that is reflexive for . has a subsequence, also denoted by , which converges weakly to some . By Arzelá-Ascoli theorem, there also exists such that
[TABLE]
A standard argument yields almost everywhere. We may consider that converges uniformly to . Hence and . As in Step 2 of [13, Section 4.1], we also have , and so . Standard argument in convex analysis shows that there exists such that almost everywhere. These lead to
[TABLE]
since converges weakly to . Hence .
Step 3. There exists a generalized -characteristic on , , such that . Since is the minimizer of , applying Lagrangian multiplier theorem (cf. [5, Theorem 6.1.1]) we get some such that . This means that there exists some satisfying
[TABLE]
and
[TABLE]
From the latter we derive that for some ,
[TABLE]
Computing as in the case of (cf. Step 3 of [13, Section 4.1]), we get that
[TABLE]
Since , . From (3.2) we may derive that has the Legendre transformation given by
[TABLE]
Using this and (3.7)-(3.8), we get that
[TABLE]
Let . Then
[TABLE]
This implies that is a constant by [14, Theorem 2], and
[TABLE]
by the Euler formula [19, Theorem 3.1]. Therefore and
[TABLE]
Let . Then is a generalized -characteristic on with action
[TABLE]
Step 4. For any generalized -characteristic on with positive action, , there holds . Since [5, Theorem 2.3.9] implies , by [13, Lemma 4.2], after reparameterization we may assume that and satisfies
[TABLE]
It follows that
[TABLE]
Similar to the case , define , , where and are chosen so that . Then (3.9) leads to
[TABLE]
Moreover, it is clear that
[TABLE]
We use this, (3.2) and the Legendre reciprocity formula (cf. [6, Proposition II.1.15]) to derive
[TABLE]
and hence
[TABLE]
By Step 1 we get and so . This, (3.9) and (3.10) lead to .
Summarizing the four steps we get (3.5) and hence (3.4) is proved. ∎
Remark 3.4**.**
(i)
Checking Step 3, it is easily seen that for a minimizer of there exists such that
[TABLE]
gives a generalized -characteristic on with action , namely, is a -carrier for .
(ii)
For a generalized -characteristic on with action , computation in Step 4 implies that
[TABLE]
is a minimizer of .
Proof of Proposition 3.2.
. Firstly, suppose . Then and the first two steps in the proof of Proposition 3.3 implies that has a minimizer . It follows that
[TABLE]
where two equalities come from Lemma 3.3 and the first inequality is because of Hölder’s inequality. Hence the functional attains its minimum at on and
[TABLE]
Next, if , then and we have minimizing such that
[TABLE]
This yields (3.11) again.
Finally, for and let minimize . It is clear that
[TABLE]
Let be as in (3.1). Then
[TABLE]
for any . By (3.11)
[TABLE]
Letting and using Lebesgue dominated convergence theorem we get
[TABLE]
This and (3.12) show that the functional attains its minimum at and
[TABLE]
Proposition 3.2 is proved. ∎
Proof of Theorem 1.1.
Choose a real . Then for Proposition 3.2 implies
[TABLE]
Now suppose that and there exist carriers and satisfying for some and some . We will prove the equality in (1.3) holds. (2.4) implies . Moreover by Remark 3.4(ii) for suitable vectors
[TABLE]
in satisfy
[TABLE]
It follows that because . Then (3.15) and (3.16) lead to
[TABLE]
Combined with (3.1) we get
[TABLE]
Now suppose that and the equality in (1.3) holds. We may require that the above satisfies . By Proposition 3.2 there exists such that
[TABLE]
The equality in (1.3) yields
[TABLE]
and thus
[TABLE]
These and Propositions 3.3, 3.2 and Hölder’s inequality lead to
[TABLE]
It follows that
[TABLE]
By Remark 3.4(i) there are such that
[TABLE]
are carriers for and , respectively. Clearly, they coincide up to dilation and translation in . Theorem 1.1 is proved. ∎
3.2 Some interesting consequences of Theorem 1.1
Since we have:
Corollary 3.5**.**
Let , and let be two convex bodies containing fixed points of in their interiors. Then
(i)
[TABLE]
and the equality holds if there exist -carriers for and which coincide up to dilation and translation by elements in .
(ii)
For , if both and are intersecting with , then
[TABLE]
In particular, if and are centrally symmetric, i.e., and , then
[TABLE]
Proof.
(i) Indeed, let and . Then (1.3) implies
[TABLE]
For , consider the symplectomorphism . Since , and are all fixed points of , and , and commute with , by Proposition 2.2 it is clear that
[TABLE]
Other claims easily follow from the arguments therein.
(ii) Since , both and are intersecting with , we deduce that for any interiors of and contain fixed points of . (3.18) follows from Proposition 2.2 and (i) directly.
Suppose further that and are centrally symmetric, i.e., and . Then and since the symplectomorphism commutes with . Thus taking and in (3.18) leads to . ∎
Let , and be as in Corollary 3.5. As in [2, 3] we may derive from Corollary 3.5 that the limit
[TABLE]
exists, denoted by . In fact, by the assumptions we can choose and . Then for some (since ). Note that . By the proof of Corollary 3.5(i) and Proposition 2.2(ii) we get
[TABLE]
and therefore that the function of in (3.20) is bounded. This function is also decreasing by Corollary 3.5(i) (see reasoning [2, pages 21-22]). Hence the limit in (3.20) exists.
The number may be viewed as the rate of change of the function in the “direction” . From Corollary 3.5 we can estimate it as follows.
Corollary 3.6**.**
Let , and be as in Corollary 3.5. Then it holds that
[TABLE]
where takes over all -carriers for .
In [2, 3] is called the length of with respect to the convex body . In the case , since , (3.21) implies
[TABLE]
It is not hard to see that (3.19) may not hold if one of and is not convex. Therefore the symplectic capacities only show good behavior in the convex category.
Proof of Corollary 3.6.
The first inequality in (3.21) easily follows from Corollary 3.5(i). In order to prove the second one let us fix a real . By Proposition 3.2 we have such that
[TABLE]
and that for some
[TABLE]
is a carrier for by Remark 3.4. Proposition 3.2 also leads to
[TABLE]
because of (3.22). Let for . Since and are fixed points of it is easily checked that is a carrier for . From (3.2) it follows that
[TABLE]
Since (see page 37 and Theorem 1.7.5 in [15]) and
[TABLE]
(by the fact ), letting in (3.26) we arrive at the second inequality in (3.21). ∎
4 Classification of -billiard trajectories and related properties of proper trajectories
In this section, we give the classification of -billiard trajectories, related properties of proper trajectories, the relation between -billiard trajectories in and -billiard trajectories. Moreover, on the base of the latter we prove that provides a lower bound of lengths of -billiard trajectory in .
Proposition 4.1**.**
Let , and be as in (1.19).
(i)
If both and are also strictly convex (i.e., they have strictly positive Gauss curvatures at every point of their boundaries), then every -billiard trajectory is either proper or gliding.
(ii)
Every proper -billiard trajectory cannot be contained in or . Consequently, contains at least a point in .
Remark 4.2**.**
If the condition ”proper” in (ii) in the above claim is dropped, then ” or ” should changed into ” or ”.**
Proof of Proposition 4.1.
(i) can be obtained form Proposition 2.12 in [3]. Let us prove (ii). By the definition we may assume that and contain the origin in their interiors. We only need to prove that every proper -billiard trajectory cannot be contained in . (Another case may be proved with the same arguments.) Otherwise, let be such a trajectory, that is, . Then is finite (including empty) and there holds
[TABLE]
for some positive constant . It follows that is constant on each component of , and so constant on by continuity of . Hence , and so on , where . Now
[TABLE]
This implies that and . The former equality leads to . Combing this with the latter equality we obtain . This implies and so , which contradicts since . ∎
Recall that the action of an -billiard trajectory is given by (2.4). The length of an -billiard trajectory is given by
[TABLE]
with
[TABLE]
where
[TABLE]
is the finite set in Definition 1.2. Here is the Euclid norm in .
The following proposition gives the relation between -billiard trajectories in and -billiard trajectories.
Proposition 4.3**.**
For a smooth convex body in and satisfying , every -billiard trajectory in , , is the projection to of a proper -billiard trajectory whose action is equal to the length of .
Proof.
By the definitions we only need to consider the case that . Let be a -billiard trajectory in with as in Definition 1.4. Then is equal to a positive constant in .
Suppose that (ABiii) occurs. Define
[TABLE]
Since the second equality in (1.5) implies that is an outer normal vector to at for each , it is easily checked that both are generalized characteristics on and . Similarly, define
[TABLE]
Then , , , , that is, is a path. Note also that
[TABLE]
by (1.9). Hence is a generalized -characteristic on . Clearly, all have zero actions. So
[TABLE]
Suppose that (ABiv) occurs. Let and be defined as above for and . If (1.9) holds, we also define as above, and get a generalized -characteristic on .
If (1.10) occurs, we also need to define
[TABLE]
By (1.8), is an outer normal vector to at . It is easy to see that is a generalized characteristic on satisfying . Moreover
[TABLE]
by (1.10). Thus is a generalized -characteristic on .
Suppose that (ABv) occurs. If (1.9) holds, we define as in the case of (ABv). When (1.11) occurs, we need to define
[TABLE]
Then is a generalized -characteristic on .
Suppose that (ABvi) occurs. If (1.9) or (1.10) or (1.11) holds, we define
[TABLE]
Finally, if (1.12) holds, we define . ∎
However, under the assumptions of Proposition 4.3 we cannot affirm that the projection to of a proper -billiard trajectory is an -billiard trajectory in .
Proposition 4.4**.**
Let be a smooth convex body and satisfy . Then it holds that
[TABLE]
Proof.
This may directly follow from Proposition 4.3, Remark1.7(i) and Theorem 2.6. ∎
The statement about relation between the action of a proper -billiard trajectory and the length of its projection to in Proposition 4.3 is a special case of the following proposition. When it was showed in [3, (7)].
Proposition 4.5**.**
Let , and satisfy (1.19). If is a proper -billiard trajectory with , then the action of is given by
[TABLE]
with , , where , and . In particular, if for and denotes the length of the projection of in then
[TABLE]
since and thus . Moreover, if is strictly convex, then the action of any gliding -billiard trajectory is also equal to the length of the projection in .
Proof.
Firstly, we prove (4.1) in the case that and . By a direct computation we have
[TABLE]
since . By (BT1) we have
[TABLE]
where and . The last two equalities mean that is either the maximum or the minimum of the function on . Note that
[TABLE]
So must be the maximum of the function on , which by definition equals . In this case (4.1) follows immediately.
Next, we deal with the general case. Now we have and such that the above result can be applied to yielding
[TABLE]
because , where , , where , and . Moreover, as above we may compute
[TABLE]
These lead to the desired (4.1) directly.
Thirdly, we prove the final claim. Now , The above expressions show that . Since and have the same length, we only need to prove the case .
Since is gliding, by Proposition 4.1(i) we have
[TABLE]
where and are two smooth positive functions satisfying a condition as in [3, (8)]. Hence has length
[TABLE]
On the other hand, as above we have
[TABLE]
∎
5 Proofs of Theorems 1.9, 1.15 and Proposition 1.10
Proof of Theorem 1.9.
Let . Since , and , is intersecting with both and . Note that
[TABLE]
It follows from Corollary 3.5 that
[TABLE]
which is equivalent to
[TABLE]
By this and the weighted arithmetic-geometric mean inequality
[TABLE]
we get
[TABLE]
Replacing and by and , respectively, we arrive at
[TABLE]
For any , since
[TABLE]
is a symplectomorphism which commutes with , we have
[TABLE]
Let us choose such that \Upsilon:=c^{\Psi_{A}}_{\rm EHZ}\bigl{(}\Delta^{\prime}_{1}\times\Lambda\bigr{)}=c^{\Psi_{A}}_{\rm EHZ}\bigl{(}\Delta^{\prime}_{2}\times\Lambda\bigr{)}, i.e.,
[TABLE]
Then
[TABLE]
and hence (1.22) holds.
Final claim follows from Corollary 3.5. Theorem 1.9 is proved. ∎
Proof of Proposition 1.10.
(i) By the definition of and Proposition 2.2(i)-(ii) we have
[TABLE]
since is a fixed point of . Note that
[TABLE]
is a symplectomorphism which commutes with . Using Proposition 2.2(i)-(ii) we deduce
[TABLE]
because of (1.24). Then (1.30) follows from (5.7).
(ii) For any , sits between support planes and , and the hyperplane is between and and has distance to and respectively. Obverse that is contained in . From this and (2.2) it follows that
[TABLE]
Hence (1.32) is proved. ∎
In order to prove Theorem 1.15 we need:
Lemma 5.1**.**
For and a convex body with , if is contained in the closure of the ball with , then
[TABLE]
Proof.
As in the proof of Proposition 1.10(i) we deduce
[TABLE]
by (1.24). This and Theorem 2.6 yield the desired claims. ∎
Proof of Theorem 1.15.
Under the assumptions of Theorem 1.15 it was stated in the bottom of [3, page 177] that for some periodic billiard trajectory in . It follows from Lemma 5.1 that , and so . ∎
**Declarations
**
**Data Availability Statements Non applicable.
**
Conflict of interest The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.
The reference list from the paper itself. Each links out to its DOI / PubMed record.
- 1[1] P. Albers, M. Mazzucchelli, Periodic bounce orbits of prescribed energy, Int. Math. Res. Not. IMRN (2011), no. 14, 3289–3314.
- 2[2] S. Artstein-Avidan, Y. Ostrover, A Brunn-Minkowski inequality for symplectic capacities of convex domains, Int. Math. Res. Not. IMRN (2008), no. 13, Art. ID rnn 044, 31 pp.
- 3[3] S. Artstein-Avidan, Y. Ostrover, Bounds for Minkowski billiard trajectories in convex bodies, Int. Math. Res. Not. IMRN (2014), no. 1, 165–193.
- 4[4] S. Artstein-Avidan, R. Karasev, Y. Ostrover, From symplectic measurements to the Mahler conjecture, Duke Math. J. , 163 (2014), no. 11, 2003–2022.
- 5[5] F. H. Clarke, Optimization and nonsmooth analysis . Canadian Mathematical Society Series of Monographs and Advanced Texts. A Wiley-Interscience Publication. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., New York, 1983.
- 6[6] I. Ekeland, Convexity methods in Hamiltonian mechanics , Ergebnisse der Mathematik und ihrer Grenzgebiete (3) [Results in Mathematics and Related Areas (3)], 19. Springer-Verlag, Berlin , 1990.
- 7[7] I. Ekeland and H. Hofer, Symplectic topology and Hamiltonian dynamics, Math. Z. , 200 (1989), 355–378.
- 8[8] I. Ekeland and H. Hofer, Symplectic topology and Hamiltonian dynamics II, Math. Z. , 203 (1990), 553–567.
