Hofer–Zehnder capacity of magnetic disc tangent bundles over constant curvature surfaces

Abstract

We compute the Hofer–Zehnder capacity of magnetic disc tangent bundles over constant curvature surfaces. We use the fact that the magnetic geodesic flow is totally periodic and can be reparametrized to obtain a Hamiltonian circle action. The oscillation of the Hamiltonian generating the circle action immediately yields a lower bound of the Hofer–Zehnder capacity. The upper bound is obtained from Lu’s bounds of the Hofer–Zehnder capacity using the theory of pseudo-holomorphic curves. In our case, the gradient spheres of the Hamiltonian H will give rise to the non-vanishing Gromov–Witten invariant.