Example 5.8 (The amoeba with thin legs) . [04K0]
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Example 5.8 (The amoeba with thin legs).
We now construct an example which interpolates Example 5.5 and 5.7. Consider the smooth function:
and let be the Hamiltonian vector field associated to . If is the flow generated by , then the Hamiltonian symplectomorphism associated to is defined to be . One computes that in our case
It maps to . We now want a symplectomorphism which acts like in a small ball centered at the origin and like the identity outside a slightly bigger ball. So choose a cut-off function such that, for some ,
| (45) |
and define the Hamiltonian
The Hamiltonian symplectomorphism associated to satisfies
Now let be the affine symplectomorphism
and finally, define . It is clear that
Notice that acts like in (37) on the ball of radius around the origin, i.e. in a neighborhood of the surface , and like in (34) outside a larger ball. We use this to construct a fibration using Proposition 5.4. One can then see that sends to a surface such that is a 3-legged amoeba with the end of the horizontal leg pinched down to a straight line. The discriminant locus of is then . Of course, fails to be smooth on the slice . Using the same method we can twist suitably and obtain a fibrations having discriminant locus an amoeba with three thin legs (cf. Figure 5). For example, to pinch the diagonal leg to a thin line, choose a smooth function generating the Hamiltonian symplectomorphism
Cut off with a function which vanishes when , for some big , and is equal to when . This produces a Hamiltonian . Now one proceeds as before. With an almost identical procedure one pinches down the vertical leg. The final choice of symplectomorphism pinching down all three legs simultaneously may look like:
| (46) |
It is clear that this piecewise smooth example is topologically conjugate to the one in Example 2.9. Here we have made explicit the twistings described there. In §7 we will show that this fibration can be modified so that it is actually smooth towards the ends of the three legs. For this we will develop further the smoothing method sketched at the end of Example 5.7. Also in §7, we will show that this fibration can be modified so that it is smooth away from a neighborhood homeomorphic to a 2-disk containing the codimension 1 part of its discriminant.