Magnetic billiards and the Hofer-Zehnder capacity of disk tangent bundles of lens spaces

Abstract

We compute the Hofer-Zehnder capacity of disk tangent bundles of certain lens spaces with respect to the round metric. Interestingly we find that the Hofer-Zehnder capacity does not see the covering, i.e. the capacity of the disk tangent bundle of the lens space coincides with the capacity of the disk tangent bundle of the 3-sphere covering it. In particular, this gives a first example, where Gromov width and Hofer-Zehnder capacity of a disk tangent bundle disagree. Techniques we use include for the lower bound magnetic billiards and for the upper bound Gromov-Witten invariants.