Cohomologous symplectic forms with different Gromov widths

Abstract

We study McDuff-Salamon's Problem 46 by showing that there exist closed manifolds of dimension $\geq 6$ admitting cohomologous symplectic forms with different Gromov widths. The examples are motivated by Ruan's early example of deformation inequivalent symplectic forms in dimension $6$ distinguished by Gromov-Witten invariants. To find cohomologous symplectic forms and compare their Gromov width, we make use of Li-Liu's theorem of symplectic cone for manifolds with $b_2^+=1$ and Biran's ball packing theorem in dimension $4$. Along the way, we also show that these cohomologous symplectic forms can have distinct first Chern classes, which answers another question by Salamon.