On the existence of symplectic barriers

Abstract

In this note we establish the existence of a new type of rigidity of symplectic embeddings coming from obligatory intersections with symplectic planes. In particular, we prove that if a Euclidean ball is symplectically embedded in the Euclidean unit ball, then it must intersect a sufficiently fine grid of two-codimensional pairwise disjoint symplectic planes. Inspired by analogous terminology for Lagrangian submanifolds, we refer to these obstructions as symplectic barriers.