Construction of special Lagrangian submanifolds of the Taub-NUT manifold and the Atiyah-Hitchin manifold

Abstract

We construct special Lagrangian submanifolds of the Taub-NUT manifold and the Atiyah-Hitchin manifold by combining the generalized Legendre transform approach and the moment map technique. The generalized Legendre transform approach provides a formulation to construct hyperk\"ahler manifolds and can make their Calabi-Yau structures manifest. In this approach, the K\"ahler $2$-forms and the holomorphic volume forms can be written in terms of holomorphic coordinates, which are convenient to employ the moment map technique. This technique derives the condition that a submanifold in the Calabi-Yau manifold is special Lagrangian. For the Taub-NUT manifold and the Atiyah-Hitchin manifold, by the moment map technique, special Lagrangian submanifolds are obtained as a one-parameter family of the orbits corresponding to Hamiltonian action with respect to their K\"ahler 2-forms. The resultant special Lagrangian submanifolds have cohomogeneity-one symmetry. To demonstrate that our method is useful, we recover the conditions for the special Lagrangian submanifold of the Taub-NUT manifold which is invariant under the tri-holomorphic $U(1)$ symmetry. As new applications of our method, we construct special Lagrangian submanifolds of the Taub-NUT manifold and the Atiyah-Hitchin manifold which are invariant under the action of a Lie subgroup of $SO(3)$. In these constructions, our conditions for being special Lagrangian are expressed by ordinary differential equations (ODEs) with respect to the one-parameters. We numerically give solution curves for the ODEs which specify the special Lagrangian submanifolds for the above cases.