5.4 Floer theory under weak regularity [04FK]
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5.4 Floer theory under weak regularity
The variational program needs to incorporate singular Lagrangians as objects of , which naturally raises many Floer theoretic questions, such as:
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Suppose a sequence of (exact, quantitatively almost calibrated, smooth) Lagrangians converge in the varifold/current topology to some singular Lagrangian, then what Floer theoretic information can be passed to the limit?
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What does it mean for two Lagrangian currents to lie in the same derived Fukaya category class?
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Does it still make sense to talk about Floer theoretic obstructions in the weak regularity setting?
In this section we will offer some general remarks and speculations about the nature of these problems, but will not solve them in any definitive way.
Remark 5.17.
There is a field called -symplectic topology, which studies properties stable with respect to convergence of Lagrangians under -Hamiltonian isotopies, especially spectral type invariants. This is morally related to our concerns here, but as far as the author understands, Floer theory for Lagrangian varifolds/currents is not yet explicitly treated in this field.
Floer theoretic difficulties
If one wishes to build Floer theory for Lagrangian currents by mimicking the smooth case constructions, then one immediately runs into a large number of severe difficulties.
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For exact embedded Lagrangians, the self Floer cohomology of a Lagrangian is isomorphic to the singular cohomology: . Now in the light of Almgren’s big regularity theorem, our best hope is that in the variational argument we only encounter codimension two singularities in the Lagrangian. We have no right to assume the topology of the Lagrangian is fixed in the variational framework. The homology groups for are highly unstable under varifold/current convergence if codimension two singularities can form, so for we do not expect a direct geometric definition of for Lagrangian currents, that possesses any reasonable continuity property under convergence.
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The standard way to set up Floer theory between two Lagrangians is to consider the transverse intersection points as the generators of the Floer complex, and counts of holomorphic strips as differentials between generators. This viewpoint depends heavily on the differential topology of the Lagrangians, which runs into troubles for Lagrangian currents, where tangent spaces only need to exist almost everywhere in a measure theoretic sense.
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Once Lagrangian intersections are not well behaved, we cannot define the bounding cochains supported at intersection points in the usual way.
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Parallel transport along local systems may break down.
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It is unclear how to define (relative) spin structures on Lagrangian currents.
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Standard Floer theory depends heavily on transversality arguments based on differential topology, which is lost on Lagrangian currents.
In short, a direct geometric construction of the structure is unlikely for Lagrangian currents.
Formal limit perspective
One natural idea is that we only develop Floer theory for sufficiently smooth Lagrangians (eg. immersed Lagrangians, isolated -cones, etc), and formally treat Lagrangian currents using approximation by smooth objects. Suppose are sufficiently smooth Lagrangian branes in the same class, and in the varifold/current topology, and assume the brane structures provide a Cauchy sequence in some appropriate sense, then one formally declare the Lagrangian current as carrying an object in the same class. A weak Lagrangian brane would then tautologically be an equivalence class of Cauchy sequences. The same Lagrangian current may in principle support many different formal brane structures, not necessarily all in the same derived category class.
In this perspective, weak Lagrangian branes are indirect constructions, whose properties amount to quantitative properties of sufficiently smooth Lagrangians that can be bounded in terms of a priori quantities such as the distance on the branes, the flat norm on the currents, the Hausdorff distance between the Lagrangians, etc.
Question 12.
Is there a notion of distance between two Lagrangian branes in the same class, that has precompactness property modulo gauge under varifold/current topology, in the setting of exact, quantitative almost calibrated Lagrangians with bounded Lagrangian potential?
One concrete notion of distance is as follows (cf. [35, Definition 2.2], see also [10, section 5]). We can look for the representing generators in and with cohomological compositions equal to the identity; in the almost calibrated case , so are unique up to scaling. Since all bounding cochains and products have non-negative Novikov exponents, and the sum of Novikov exponents add up to zero, we must have some negative Novikov exponent for or . In our context, the Novikov exponent amounts to at and at . The quantity
provides a candidate notion of distance between Lagrangian branes. Notice this distance bounds the energy of the holomorphic discs with boundary on . Given three objects , by considering the composition of the generators, it is easy to deduce .
Does this notion of distance have any precompactness property? Namely, given a sequence of sufficiently smooth Lagrangian objects , (eg. a minimizing sequence for the Solomon functional), and assuming the Lagrangian potentials are uniformly bounded, then up to making gauge equivalent choices of local systems and bounding cochains, when can we extract a Cauchy subsequence?
Remark 5.18.
As an illustration of the subtlety, consider immersed Lagrangians built as the cone of . Replacing by for results in new bounding cochain structures on , but the distance between these brane structures is zero. The limit however belongs to a different class. This suggests our formulation of weak Lagrangian branes is probably not sufficient to distinguish between several derived category classes.
One may also ask if the weak Lagrangian branes agree with ordinary Lagrangian branes in the case of smooth immersed Lagrangians:
Question 13.
Suppose is a sequence of immersed Lagrangian branes, all in the same class, and is a Cauchy sequence with respect to the distance on the branes. Suppose is an immersed Lagrangian, and in the varifold/current topology. Then does there exist a suitable brane structure on so that with respect to the distance on the branes?
Geometric perspective: bordism currents and triangulated categories
It is interesting to ask if any Floer theoretic geometric construction may be performed on Lagrangian currents at all. While the -category structure on the Fukaya category may not necessarily be robust under varifold/current convergence of Lagrangians, only a subset of the structures are essential to the Thomas-Yau conjecture:
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The notion of derived Fukaya category classes.
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The notion of distinguished triangles, within the class of Lagrangians . This is the categorical shadow of the phenomenon that Lagrangians can be broken into several components under weak limits.
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The central charge function.
The central charge is of numerical nature, and is continuous under convergence in the current topology. A key feature of lying in the same derived category class is that there is a bordism current constructed from holomorphic curves, such that . Likewise for distinguished triangles in the weak regularity setting, a key expected property is that there should be a bordism current between and , constructed from families of holomorphic curves.
Question 14.
Given unobstructed (sufficiently smooth) exact Lagrangians all in the same derived category class. Assume convergence and in the varifold/current topology. Can we assign an -bordism current between and , constructed from the moduli space of holomorphic curves with boundary on and ?
The basic idea is to take the bordism current with , constructed from the universal family of holomorphic curves, and attempt to extract the limit as currents. This could be morally viewed as a version of Gromov compactness for families. As rather strong evidence, in the quantitatively almost calibrated setting we derived uniform energy bound for holomorphic curves contributing to , by proving the potential clustering property (cf. section 5.2.1, and Prop. 3.41). If we work with Fukaya category over the integers, the bordism currents would be integral currents, and we can hope to extract limit by some compactness argument. The problem is that we do not know have uniform mass upper bounds. Morever, it is an interesting question how to formulate the parametrized family structure of the bordism current in the geometric measure theory language.
Remark 5.19.
While Lagrangian intersections, bounding cochains, spin structures, local systems etc. do not make sense directly on Lagrangian currents, the bordism current has a chance to make sense, and encodes substantial information. For instance, the orientations of the moduli spaces reflect the spin structures, and the weighting factors for the moduli spaces encode the combined effect of bounding cochain elements and the parallel transport along the local system.
Remark 5.20.
As mentioned in section 3.5, the mere requirement for the Floer theoretic obstruction criterion (i.e. the stability condition) to make sense for Lagrangian currents is already very constraining. Most statements are simply impossible to make without concepts that need at least -regularity, and the bordism currents between integration cycles are among the rare exceptions. This was one of the heuristic arguments in section 3.5 that obstructions must come from bordism currents.
Question 15.
How much of the triangulated category structure works for weak regularity exact Lagrangians? How much of Floer theory can be developed upon the notion of bordism currents? Is it possible to encode weak Lagrangian branes à là the formal limit perspective, in terms of bordism currents?
We mentioned in Remark 3.5 that when more than two Lagrangians are present, Floer theory would also produce -dimensional currents whose boundary exhibit homological relations between the -dimensional bordism currents. Such ‘bordisms between bordisms’ may encode further information about the triangulated category.
Previlleged role of
We consider quantitative almost calibrated Lagrangians. We mentioned above that for is problematic, by analogy with singular cohomology. On the other hand, is much more robust compared to higher cohomologies, in the sense that the fundamental cycle of can deform in a continuous way, under topological changes such as the shrinking of a codimension two cycle. Continuing with the analogy, we expect the geometric information in behaves more continuously under current/varifold limits than the higher degree Floer groups. This is compatible with the fact that the bordism current between encodes the compositions and , with and , and we expect bordism currents have some continuity properties under varifold/current convergence.
Remark 5.21.
This previlleged role of is reflected in the usual Thomas-Yau argument (cf. section 2.2), which only makes use of , not the higher Floer cohomologies, nor full set of higher products.
Remark 5.22.
In the passage from the Fukaya category to the derived category, the morphism space only retains , not the full . The ususal way the derived category remembers higher Floer cohomology, is via the shift operator . However, in the Thomas-Yau-Joyce picture, working with the almost calibrated setting means conjecturally that we are picking out an abelian subcategory, which breaks the shift symmetry of the derived category. This gives a categorical explanation why may behave very differently from the higher Floer groups.
Multiplicity issues
The same underlying geometric Lagrangian can conceivably support many different objects in the Fukaya category. A possible source of this problem is a sequence of immersed Lagrangians converging to a multiple of a Lagrangian current . The underlying Lagrangian current contains only the support information and the multiplicity, which can be imagined as the number of sheets in . Much geometric information, however, is not captured this way:
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Take two Lagrangians which are both close to a given immersed Lagrangian , but whose Lagrangian potentials differ by approximately a constant. In the limit as currents, but the potential information is lost. On the other hand, the potential clustering property can restore this information.
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Immersed Lagrangians may be nontrivial (branched) covers over other immersed Lagrangians. When this happens, the monodromy information is not remembered by the underlying current. On the other hand, it is conceivable that some (generalized) local system data can restore this information.
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Let be a closed smooth manifold. Abouzaid [3] showed that the wrapped Fukaya category of the cotangent bundle is generated by any cotangent fibre , and the wrapped Floer cochain complex of is -equivalent to for the based loop space . In particular, for any (compact, embedded, exact) Lagrangian , the Floer cohomologies and are representations of . This cotangent bundle case can be viewed as the local model of Lagrangians contained in a small neighbourhood of a given embedded Lagrangian.
It is interesting to ask how much of such information can still make sense for Lagrangian currents.
Remark 5.23.
Multiple covers of Lagrangians may be related to the following problem of the Fukaya category. Given a class in the Grothendieck group of represented by a Lagrangian, one may ask if the primitive of this class is also represented by a Lagrangian. Such questions are related to the idempotent closure problem of in Joyce’s program, which seems very delicate.
Remark 5.24.
Construction of special Lagrangian branched multiple covers over given special Lagrangians is currently studied by S. Donaldson [29] and S. He among others.
Remark 5.25.
A holomorphic vector bundle analogue for multiply covered Lagrangians is the (multiple) extension of the bundle by itself, such as the fitting into a short exact sequence . In the HYM setting these are prototypical sources of semistable but not stable bundles, and it would not be surprising if similar phenomenon happens in the Thomas-Yau program.