Three fixed points on the symplectic quadric threefold
Abstract
We construct a smooth Hamiltonian diffeomorphism of the complex quadric threefold with exactly three fixed points, at least one of which is degenerate. The critical number and the unit-inclusive rational cup length of this manifold are both four. Thus the example disproves the unrestricted critical-number and rational cup-length forms of the Arnold conjecture.
Introduction
Arnold’s fixed-point conjecture compares Hamiltonian dynamics with the critical-point theory of smooth functions. For a sufficiently short autonomous Hamiltonian flow on a closed symplectic manifold, its fixed points are exactly the critical points of its Hamiltonian. The conjecture asks whether an arbitrary Hamiltonian diffeomorphism must retain the minimum number of critical points forced by the topology of the manifold. Arnold’s formulation explicitly includes the count of geometrically distinct points [1], Section 2. We construct a smooth counterexample on the complex quadric threefold, which also violates the weaker rational cup-length bound.
The two degenerate bounds. For a closed smooth manifold , write
The minimum here permits degenerate critical points, whereas the Morse number minimizes only over Morse functions. Let be one plus the maximum number of positive-degree rational cohomology classes with nonzero cup product. Thus our cup-length convention includes the unit. The Lusternik–Schnirelmann inequality gives
Section 5 recalls the cup-product argument in a form that applies to arbitrary smooth functions.
A Hamiltonian diffeomorphism of a symplectic manifold is the time-one map of a smooth time-dependent Hamiltonian flow. We write for these maps, use the convention , and set . The critical-number Arnold bound asserts that
for every on every closed connected symplectic manifold. Its weaker rational cup-length form replaces by . Neither formulation assumes nondegeneracy; see Golovko [7], Conjectures 1.4 and 1.6. A fixed point is nondegenerate when is not an eigenvalue of .
Let
with the restricted Fubini–Study symplectic form, normalized in Section 3.
Theorem 1.1. There is a smooth Hamiltonian diffeomorphism of the closed connected symplectic six-manifold such that
At least one fixed point of is degenerate.
This disproves both unrestricted smooth bounds. The count includes all fixed points, so imposing a contractibility condition on their Hamiltonian trajectories cannot restore either inequality. The nondegenerate homological Arnold inequalities concern a different hypothesis and remain compatible with this example.
The count of three is sharp. Gong [8], Section 1.1.1 obtains at least fixed points for every Hamiltonian diffeomorphism of the standard complex quadric of complex dimension . His normalization of the Fubini–Study form differs from ours by a positive scalar, which does not change the Hamiltonian group: rescaling the form and a generating Hamiltonian by the same scalar preserves its vector field. Thus our example attains his bound for .
Historical context and related work. The positive cases explain why the unrestricted comparison is natural. Conley and Zehnder proved that every Hamiltonian diffeomorphism of the standard symplectic torus has at least fixed points [3], and Fortune obtained the bound on standard [5]. Hofer obtained cup-length bounds without nondegeneracy when [9], Theorem 4. Rudyak and Oprea proved the full critical-number bound when both the symplectic class and the first Chern class vanish on [17], Corollary 4.3. The quadric has spheres of positive symplectic area and lies outside these latter hypotheses.
Floer’s pseudoholomorphic-curve methods established homological Morse inequalities for nondegenerate Hamiltonian fixed points, including the monotone setting [4]. The lower bound by the sum of rational Betti numbers was subsequently established for nondegenerate Hamiltonian diffeomorphisms on every closed symplectic manifold by Fukaya and Ono, Liu and Tian, and Ruan [6, 11, 16]. The distinction between these bounds and the degenerate formulations above is essential; see [7], Theorem 1.3 and Conjectures 1.4 and 1.6. Ma [13], Theorem 1.5 asserted that the minimum number of fixed points over all Hamiltonian diffeomorphisms always equals . Theorem 1.1 contradicts that assertion.
Regularity also matters. Buhovsky, Humilière, and Seyfaddini constructed Hamiltonian homeomorphisms with a single fixed point on every closed connected symplectic manifold of real dimension at least four [2]. Our construction stays in the smooth Hamiltonian group. In a preprint posted September 27, 2026, Jiao [10], Theorem 1.1 reports a smooth Hamiltonian diffeomorphism of the equal-area product with two fixed points, using local saddle merging and mixed generating functions. The construction here instead uses a finite-order map on a six-dimensional quadric. None of these fixed-point results is an input to our construction.
Proof mechanism. The key is to transfer a critical-point count from a fixed submanifold to the fixed-point count of a nearby Hamiltonian map. Let be a finite-order Hamiltonian map with fixed submanifold , whose fixed tangent vectors are exactly those tangent to . Extend a function on to an -invariant function on the ambient manifold, and let be its Hamiltonian flow. If , invariance gives
For sufficiently small , the right side has only stationary fixed points. Any fixed point of is therefore a critical point of fixed by . Finite-group averaging makes ambient criticality on equivalent to criticality of , giving
This criticality step is the finite-group case of Palais’s principle of symmetric criticality [15], Section 5; the power identity excludes additional fixed points away from .
For the quadric, take the Hamiltonian involution
Its fixed locus is the quadric surface . This product admits functions with only three critical points, as recorded by Mare [14], Proposition 3.2.5 through an extension of Takens’s sphere-product construction [18]. We give an explicit formula and compute its entire critical set. The isolated degenerate critical point becomes a degenerate Hamiltonian fixed point. In contrast, symplectic volume forces every smooth function on the ambient to have at least four critical points, and a Hamiltonian rotation realizes that minimum.
Section 2 proves the finite-order transfer, including the short-period estimate and invariant extension. Section 3 constructs the Hamiltonian involution and its tangent splitting. Section 4 gives the three-critical-point function. Section 5 proves the critical-number and rational cup-length equalities on , and Section 6 assembles the construction and verifies degeneracy.
Perturbing a finite-order Hamiltonian map
A short Hamiltonian perturbation of a finite-order map can replace its fixed submanifold by the critical set of a function on that submanifold. The tangent-space hypothesis below is the usual clean fixed-set condition; we state it explicitly to identify the geometric input.
Proposition 2.1. Let be a closed symplectic manifold, and let satisfy for some positive integer . Suppose that is a closed embedded submanifold and that
For every smooth function , there is a smooth -invariant extension such that, if is its Hamiltonian flow, then for every sufficiently small the map
is Hamiltonian and satisfies
where the critical set on the right is viewed as a subset of .
The proof combines finite-group averaging with the exclusion of short nonconstant periodic trajectories. We establish the latter fact first. Lipschitz control of a vector field gives a lower bound for its nonconstant periods, a classical principle for which Yorke proved the sharp Euclidean estimate [20]. The following elementary local argument suffices here.
Lemma 2.2. Let be a smooth vector field on a closed manifold , and let be its flow. There is a number such that
Proof. The flow is defined for all time because is compact. Suppose that there were points and times with
After passing to a subsequence, assume that . Choose coordinates near , and a Euclidean ball about its coordinate image whose closure lies inside the coordinate domain. By continuity of the flow, all sufficiently late trajectory segments lie in this ball. The coordinate vector field is Lipschitz there with a constant , since its derivative is bounded on the closed ball.
Write for the coordinate trajectory and set
For any , convexity of the ball and the Lipschitz estimate give
The closed trajectory has zero mean coordinate velocity: . At a time of maximum speed, it follows that
Dividing by contradicts . Thus all fixed points of a sufficiently short positive-time map are zeros of . Conversely, every zero of is stationary and hence fixed by every .
Proof of Proposition 2.1. The first step is to extend so that criticality along is equivalent to ambient criticality at points of . This is the finite-group case of symmetric criticality [15], which we verify directly. Extend smoothly to a function on : in submanifold charts, extend independently of the normal coordinates, and combine these local extensions using a partition of unity. Define
Then and .
Fix , put , and consider
Since , we have . Moreover, whenever . Thus is a projection onto . Differentiating the averaged extension gives, for every ,
Consequently,
Because is symplectic and , its differential carries the Hamiltonian vector field to itself. Uniqueness of solutions therefore gives for every . Apply Lemma 2.2 to , and choose . We then have
If , then is fixed by , so . It follows that , and hence . Conversely, every point of is fixed by . Equation 2.1 proves the asserted equality of fixed and critical sets.
For completeness, the composition is generated by a smooth Hamiltonian on the unit time interval. Choose a Hamiltonian path from to , generated by , and a smooth nondecreasing function equal to near and to near . The time-dependent Hamiltonian
is smooth, since both pieces vanish near the joining time. Its flow first follows , and then , so its time-one map is .
The proposition imposes no bound on the total number of critical points of , and requires invariance under , not under an isotopy from to . A critical point satisfies , so it contributes no fixed point.
A Hamiltonian involution of a quadric
We now construct the manifold and involution to which Proposition 2.1 will apply. Let be the quadric defined in (1.2).
Proposition 3.1. The manifold is closed, connected, and of real dimension six. For the restricted Fubini–Study form , normalized below, the map
is a Hamiltonian involution. Its fixed set is the smooth submanifold
For every , the differential acts as on and as on a complementary real two-dimensional subspace of .
Proof. In any standard affine chart of , the equation defining takes the form . Its differential cannot vanish on its zero set: that would force all the to be zero. Thus is a smooth complex hypersurface, of complex dimension three. As a closed subset of projective space it is compact, and it has no boundary.
To see connectedness, write a nonzero isotropic vector as with . Its real and imaginary parts satisfy
After rescaling, they form an ordered orthonormal pair. Every such pair extends to a positively oriented orthonormal basis, so these pairs form one orbit of the connected group . Their map onto proves that is connected.
We construct the symplectic form with its normalization explicit. On the unit sphere , put
The form is invariant under scalar phase rotations. If , then
Consequently it descends under the quotient map to a two-form , characterized by . Local sections show that is smooth and closed. A projective tangent vector has a horizontal lift satisfying ; multiplication by on these lifts induces the complex structure. Since
is positive on every complex tangent line. Its restriction is therefore closed and nondegenerate.
We use a family of Hamiltonian rotations: equal speeds will give the involution, and unequal speeds will later give a function with four critical points on . For , let keep fixed and act on and by and , respectively, where
These real orthogonal, complex unitary transformations preserve the quadric and . If is their generating vector field on , Cartan's formula gives
The function is phase invariant, because the rotations commute with scalar multiplication. It thus descends to a smooth function on projective space. The displayed identity descends as well, so generates the projected rotations on with our convention . Explicitly,
In particular, is Hamiltonian and preserves .
A projective line fixed by lies in one of the two eigenspaces of . The positive eigenspace gives the single point , which does not lie in . The negative eigenspace gives precisely . To identify , use the invertible complex-linear map
Its determinant is . It therefore identifies with the projectivized nonzero rank-one matrices. The map
is a diffeomorphism: a nonzero column and row recover the two projective factors, smoothly on the corresponding matrix charts. Finally, stereographic coordinates identify each with . Only this smooth identification is needed below.
For the tangent-space assertion, fix and choose an affine chart with . In its normalized coordinates, sends to and leaves all other coordinates fixed. The equation of is
At , where , its linearization places no constraint on the direction. The remaining differential is nonzero, so its kernel in the other coordinates is exactly . Thus
with the asserted and actions. This also verifies directly that is a smooth complex surface. The positivity established above therefore makes symplectic.
Three critical points on the fixed submanifold
We next construct a function on the fixed submanifold with three critical points. The comparison with functions on the ambient quadric will follow in Section 5. Three-critical-point functions on products of spheres belong to the classical study of critical-point minima and category by Takens [18]; the case is recorded by Mare [14] (Proposition 3.2.5). We use the explicit formula below and determine its entire critical set directly, without importing an existence theorem or assuming that its critical points are Morse.
Proposition 4.1. Let and in . The smooth function
has exactly three critical points.
Proof. For a fixed , the -dependence is a height function on the second sphere, with critical points . At that height function is constant, but criticality of the full function still requires its derivative in the directions to vanish. We therefore separate this exceptional fiber from the two height branches.
The constrained critical-point equations are
for real multipliers . If , the first equation gives . Its unit norm forces , yielding the unique point
Suppose now that and set . The second equation in (4.2) gives for a sign . The first then becomes
Since the left side is nonzero, and lies in the plane spanned by and . Write . The definition of gives . Taking the first equation in (4.2) against the tangent vector gives
Consequently the unit-norm condition reduces to
Because , this forces , , and . In particular, the other pole , for which , is excluded. The two resulting candidates are
Both satisfy (4.2) with , and
The cases and exhaust the domain, proving the count.
Remark 4.2. The critical point is degenerate. Indeed, in local coordinates
the function has expansion
Its Hessian therefore has eigenvalues , so its rank is two. The complete critical-point calculation proves that this degenerate point is isolated. This is why a count restricted to Morse functions would not capture the example.
The critical number and cup length of the quadric
We now show that four is both the critical number and the rational cup length of the ambient quadric. The lower bound is the classical cup-product obstruction from Lusternik–Schnirelmann theory [12]; see Weber [19] for a modern treatment valid without a Morse assumption. We give the differential-form proof, then obtain the matching upper bound from the unequal-speed rotations of Section 3.
Lemma 5.1. Let be a closed smooth manifold and an integer. Suppose there are classes , with for , such that . Then every smooth function on has at least critical points.
Proof. Suppose that has at most critical points. List its distinct critical values as , where ; the absolute minimum and maximum are among them. For a fixed Riemannian metric let be the negative-gradient flow of , which is complete by compactness, and put . We first cover by open sets, each diffeomorphic to a finite disjoint union of coordinate balls. Every closed positive-degree form will be exact on each of these sets; the cover will therefore force every product of positive-degree cohomology classes to vanish.
Around the critical points at , choose an open set that is a union of disjoint coordinate balls, and a smaller neighborhood with . A bound on the speed of the flow and the positive distance between and give such that trajectories starting outside stay outside for .
Choose a closed level band narrow enough that it contains no critical points outside . On the part outside , compactness gives a positive lower bound for ; if that set is empty, any positive will do. Choose so that the intervals are separated and . Along the negative-gradient flow,
A point of either already lies below or decreases at rate at least until it reaches that level. It follows that
For , a further fixed flow time carries into : the compact band between these levels contains no critical points and has a positive gradient-norm lower bound.
Since is the absolute minimum, is empty, and (5.1) shows that . Inductively, cover by and the preimages under of the sets covering the preceding upper sublevel. Equation (5.1) proves that these sets cover. Each is a diffeomorphism of , so every member remains diffeomorphic to a finite disjoint union of coordinate balls. The last upper sublevel is all of , since is the absolute maximum.
Write the resulting cover as . Choose closed forms representing for . Since these forms have positive degree, the Poincaré lemma on each ball gives on . Choose a smooth partition of unity subordinate to the cover. Let be smooth, zero on and one on , and put . At every point some , so some is identically one nearby. Each extends smoothly by zero outside . The closed forms
represent the same classes as . Near every point, at least one of these forms vanishes, and hence . Thus , contradicting the nonvanishing of because .
Extension of coefficients is injective for a closed manifold and respects cup products. The lemma therefore also gives
with the unit-inclusive convention of Section 1. It also recovers the symplectic-volume obstruction used in our example.
Corollary 5.2. Every smooth function on a closed connected symplectic manifold of real dimension , with , has at least critical points.
Proof. The class is nonzero, since in the symplectic orientation. Apply Lemma 5.1 with each . ∎
Corollary 5.3. For the quadric threefold in (1.2),
Proof. Let be the hyperplane class. Since has degree two in ,
where evaluates to one on the fundamental class. This product remains nonzero over , giving .
For the matching upper bound, take the Hamiltonian of (3.1). Its critical points are precisely the zeros of its Hamiltonian vector field. That field is induced on by the complex-linear generator
The induced projective vector field vanishes at exactly when . The eigenvalues of are distinct, so its projective zeros are its five eigenlines. The zero eigenline misses , whereas the other four lines
all satisfy the quadric equation. Thus has exactly four critical points on . Together with (5.2), this gives
The Hamiltonian counterexample
We now apply the finite-order reduction to the function on the fixed surface and compare the resulting fixed-point count with the ambient critical number and cup length.
Proof of Theorem 1.1. Take the symplectic quadric and Hamiltonian involution from Proposition 3.1. Its fixed submanifold is diffeomorphic to . Transport the function of Proposition 4.1 to ; it has exactly three critical points.
Proposition 2.1 provides a smooth -invariant extension with . Let denote its Hamiltonian flow. For all sufficiently small , the map
is a Hamiltonian diffeomorphism and satisfies , with the critical points viewed as points of . The exact comparison in Corollary 5.3 now gives
It remains to verify the asserted degeneracy. Write , which is symplectic, and let be the Hamiltonian vector field of on . Invariance of makes tangent to , and restricting its defining equation to gives . Indeed, at invariance gives , and the fixed tangent space is . Thus preserves , and its restriction is the Hamiltonian flow of on . At the critical point of Remark 4.2, differentiating gives
Thus any nonzero vector in the Hessian kernel satisfies . Since and is an equilibrium,
The fixed point therefore has eigenvalue 1 in its linearization. This argument takes place entirely in the invariant subspace ; no assumption on the normal Hessian of the extension is needed.
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