Finite-energy pseudoholomorphic planes with multiple asymptotic limits

Abstract

It's known from from work of Hofer, Wysocki, and Zehnder [1996] and Bourgeois [2002] that in a contact manifold equipped with either a nondegenerate or Morse-Bott contact form, a finite-energy pseudoholomorphic curve will be asymptotic at each of its non removable punctures to a single periodic orbit of the Reeb vector field and that the convergence is exponential. We provide examples here to show that this need not be the case if the contact form is degenerate. More specifically, we show that on any contact manifold $(M,\xi )$ with cooriented contact structure one can choose a contact form $\lambda$ with $\ker \lambda =\xi$ and a compatible complex structure $J$ on $\xi$ so that for the associated $\mathbb{R}$-invariant almost complex structure $\tilde{J}$ on $\mathbb{R}\times M$ there exist families of embedded finite-energy $\tilde{J}$-holomorphic cylinders and planes having embedded tori as limit sets.

16 pages; some typos fixed and minor edits made; to appear in Mathematische Annalen

Cited by in corpus (5)

• Symplectic Homology of complements of smooth divisors
• Automatic transversality in contact homology II: filtrations and computations
• Algebraic and Giroux torsion in higher-dimensional contact manifolds
• Reeb flows, pseudo-holomorphic curves and transverse foliations
• SFT computations and intersection theory in higher-dimensional contact manifolds