Circle Foliations Revisited: Periods of Flows whose Orbits are all Closed

Abstract

Our purpose here is to adapt the results of Geodesic circle foliations for Reeb flows or Hamiltonian flows on contact manifolds. Consequently, all periods are exactly the same if the contact manifold is connected and all orbits on the contact manifold are closed. We also present concrete examples of periodic flows, all of whose orbits are closed, such as Harmonic oscillators, Lotka-Volterra systems, and others. Lotka-Volterra systems, Reeb flows, and some geodesic flows have non-trivial periods, whereas the periods of Harmonic oscillators and similar systems can be easily obtained through direct calculations. As an application to quantum mechanics, we examine the spectrum of semiclassical Shr\"odinger operators. Then we have one of the semiclassical analogies of the Helton-Guillemin theorem.