Fixed points of symplectic periodic flows

Abstract: The study of fixed points is a classical subject in geometry and dynamics. If the circle acts in a Hamiltonian fashion on a compact symplectic manifold M, then it is classically known that there are at least 1 + dim(M)/2 fixed points; this follows from Morse theory for the momentum map of the action. In this paper we use Atiyah-Bott-Berline-Vergne (ABBV) localization in equivariant cohomology to prove that this conclusion also holds for symplectic circle actions with non-empty fixed sets, as long as the Chern class map is somewhere injective -- the Chern class map assigns to a fixed point the sum of the action weights at the point. We complement this result with less sharp lower bounds on the number of fixed points, under no assumptions; from a dynamical systems viewpoint, our results imply that there is no symplectic periodic flow with exactly one or two equilibrium points on a compact manifold of dimension at least eight.