Joint IAS/Princeton/Montreal/Paris/Tel-Aviv Symplectic Geometry Zoominar

The C0 distance on the space of contact forms on a contact manifold has been studied recently by different authors. It can be thought of as an analogue for Reeb flows of the Hofer metric on the space of Hamiltonian diffeomorphisms. In this talk, I will explain some recent progress on the stability properties of the topological entropy with respect to this distance obtained in collaboration with M. Alves, L. Dahinden, and A. Pirnapasov. Our main result states that the topological entropy for closed contact 3-manifolds is lower semi-continuous in the C0 distance for $C^{\infty}$-generic contact froms. Applying our methods to geodesic flows of surfaces, we obtain that the points of lower-semicontinuity of the topological entropy include non-degenerate metrics. In particular, given a geodesic flow of such a metric with positive topological entropy, the topological entropy does not vanish for sufficiently C0-small perturbations of the metric.