The Poisson bracket invariant on surfaces

Abstract

We study the Poisson bracket invariant, which measures the level of Poisson noncommutativity of a smooth partition of unity, on closed symplectic surfaces. Motivated by a general conjecture of Polterovich and building on preliminary work of Buhovsky--Tanny, we prove that for any smooth partition of unity subordinate to an open cover by discs of area at most $c$, and under some localization condition on the cover when the surface is a sphere, then the product of the Poisson bracket invariant with $c$ is bounded from below by a universal constant. Similar results were obtained recently by Buhovsky--Logunov--Tanny for open covers consisting of displaceable sets on all closed surfaces, and their approach was extended by Shi--Lu to open covers by nondisplaceable discs. We investigate the sharpness of all these results.