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

In this talk, based on joint work with Gonzalo Contreras, I will briefly sketch the proof of the existence of global surfaces of section for the Reeb flows of closed 3-manifolds satisfying a condition à la Kupka-Smale: non-degeneracy of the closed Reeb orbits, and transversality of the stable and unstable manifolds of the hyperbolic closed Reeb orbits.
I will then present an application of this theorem to hyperbolic Reeb dynamics: a Reeb flow on a closed 3-manifold is Anosov if and only if the closure of the subspace of closed Reeb orbits is hyperbolic and the Kupka-Smale transversality condition holds. This result implies the validity of the $C^2$ stability conjecture for Riemannian geodesic flows of closed surfaces: any such geodesic flow that is $C^2$ structurally stable within the class of Riemannian geodesic flows must be Anosov