Margherita Sandon (Stasbourg) will speak in the geometry seminar at 2pm on Tuesday 21st May, in the Salle des Profs (9th floor, building NO). Please note the unusual day! Margherita’s title is “Contact non-squeezing at large scale via generating functions” and her abstract is below.
The symplectic non-squeezing theorem, discovered by Gromov in 1985, has been the first result showing a fundamental difference between symplectic transformations and volume preserving ones. A similar but more subtle phenomenon in contact topology was found by Eliashberg, Kim and Polterovich in 2006, and refined by Fraser in 2016 and Chiu in 2017: in this case non-squeezing depends on the size of the domains, and only appears above a certain quantum scale. In my talk I will outline a proof of this general contact non-squeezing theorem using generating functions, a classical method based on finite dimensional Morse theory. This is a joint work with Maia Fraser and Bingyu Zhang.