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

The group of Hamiltonian diffeomorphisms of a symplectic manifold admits a remarkable bi-invariant metric, called Hofer’s metric. My talk will be about a recent joint work with Dan Cristofaro-Gardiner and Vincent Humilière resolving the following two open-questions related to the large-scale geometry of this metric. The first, due to Kapovich and Polterovich, asks whether the two-sphere, equipped with Hofer’s metric, is quasi-isometric to the real line; we show that it is not. The second, due to Fathi, asks whether the group of area and orientation preserving homeomorphisms of the two-sphere is a simple group; we show that it is not. Key to our proofs is a new sequence of spectral invariants defined via Hutchings’ Periodic Floer Homology.