Normal forms in Poisson geometry

Abstract

The structure of Poisson manifolds is highly nontrivial even locally. The first important result in this direction is Conn's linearization theorem around fixed points. One of the main results of this thesis (Theorem 2) is a normal form theorem in Poisson geometry, which is the Poisson-geometric version of the Local Reeb Stability (from foliation theory) and of the Slice Theorem (from equivariant geometry). The result generalizes Conn's theorem from one-point leaves to arbitrary symplectic leaves. We present two proofs of this result: a geometric one relying heavily on the theory of Lie algebroids and Lie groupoids (similar to the new proof of Conn's theorem by Crainic and Fernandes), and an analytic one using the Nash-Moser fast convergence method (more in the spirit of Conn's original proof). The analytic approach gives much more, we prove a local rigidity result (Theorem 4) around compact Poisson submanifolds, which is the first of this kind in Poisson geometry. Yet more surprising is an application of this result to smooth deformation of Poisson structures: in Theorem 5 we compute the Poisson-moduli space around the Lie-Poisson sphere (i.e. the invariant unit sphere inside the linear Poisson manifold corresponding to a compact semisimple Lie algebra). This can be described as the space of invariant functions on the sphere modulo the finite group of outer automorphism of the Lie algebra, thus it is infinite dimensional. This is the first such computation of a Poisson moduli space in dimension greater or equal to three around a degenerate (i.e. non-symplectic) Poisson structure. Other results presented in the thesis are: a new proof to the existence of symplectic realizations (Theorem 0), a normal form theorem for symplectic foliations (Theorem 1), a formal normal form/rigidity result around Poisson submanifolds (Theorem 3), and a general construction of tame homotopy operators for Lie algebroid cohomology (the Tame Vanishing Lemma).