European Mathematical Society - EMS - Publishing House GmbH

JEMS is a new mathematical research journal, founded by the EMS, aiming at the highest international scientific level, and edited by Jürgen Jost (managing editor), Luigi Ambrosio, Gerard Ben Arous, John Coates, Helmut Hofer, Alexander Merkurjev and a board of about 30 associate editors. It will be published by Springer. The first issue will appear in January 1999. The current editorial wishes to present JEMS by answering some questions that will naturally be posed.

Two dynamical deformation theories are presented – one for surface homeomorphisms, called pruning, and another for graph endomorphisms, called kneading– both giving conditions under which all of the dynamics in an open set can be destroyed, while leaving the dynamics unchanged elsewhere. The theories are related to each other and to Thurston’s classification of surface homeomorphisms up to isotopy.

The distributional k-dimensional Jacobian of a map u in the Sobolev space W 1,k-1 which takes values in the the sphere S k-1 can be viewed as the boundary of a rectifiable current of codimension k carried by (part of) the singularity of u which is topologically relevant. The main purpose of this paper is to investigate the range of the Jacobian operator; in particular, we show that any boundary M of codimension k can be realized as Jacobian of a Sobolev map valued in S k-1. In case M is polyhedral, the map we construct is smooth outside M plus an additional polyhedral set of lower dimension, and can be used in the constructive part of the proof of a Γ-convergence result for functionals of Ginzburg-Landau type, as described in [2].

We obtain rigidity and gluing results for the Morse complex of a real-valued Morse function as well as for the Novikov complex of a circle-valued Morse function. A rigidity result is also proved for the Floer complex of a hamiltonian defined on a closed symplectic manifold (M,ω) with c 1|π2(M)=[ω]|π2(M)=0. The rigidity results for these complexes show that the complex of a fixed generic function/hamiltonian is a retract of the Morse (respectively Novikov or Floer) complex of any other sufficiently C 0 close generic function/hamiltonian. The gluing result is a type of Mayer-Vietoris formula for the Morse complex. It is used to express algebraically the Novikov complex up to isomorphism in terms of the Morse complex of a fundamental domain. Morse cobordisms are used to compare various Morse-type complexes without the need of bifurcation theory.

For vector valued maps, convergence in W 1,1 and of all minors of the Jacobian matrix in L 1 is equivalent to convergence weakly in the sense of currents and in area for graphs. We show that maps defined on domains of dimension n≥ 3 can be approximated strongly in this sense by smooth maps if and only if the same property holds for the restriction to a.e. 2-dimensional plane intersecting the domain.

Arnold conjectured that every Legendrian knot in the standard contact structure on the 3-sphere possesses a characteristic chord with respect to any contact form. I confirm this conjecture if the know has Thurston-Bennequin invariant −1. More generally, existence of chords is proved for a standard Legendrian unknot on the boundary of a subcritical Stein manifold of any dimension. There is also a multiplicity result which implies in some situations existence of infinitely many chords.¶The proof relies on the behaviour of symplectic homology under handle attaching. The main observation is that symplectic homology only changes in the presence of chords.

This paper is motivated by the question whether there is a nice structure theory of finitely generated modules over the Iwasawa algebra, i.e. the completed group algebra, Λ of a p-adic analytic group G. For G without any p-torsion element we prove that Λ is an Auslander regular ring. This result enables us to give a good definition of the notion of a pseudo-nullΛ-module. This is classical when G=ℤ k p for some integer k≥1, but was previously unknown in the non-commutative case. Then the category of Λ-modules up to pseudo-isomorphisms is studied and we obtain a weak structure theorem for the ℤ p -torsion part of a finitely generated Λ-module. We also prove a local duality theorem and a version of Auslander-Buchsbaum equality. The arithmetic applications to the Iwasawa theory of abelian varieties are published elsewhere.