Displacement energy of unit disk cotangent bundles

Abstract

We give an upper bound of a Hamiltonian displacement energy of a unit disk cotangent bundle \(D^*M\) in a cotangent bundle \(T^*M\), when the base manifold \(M\) is an open Riemannian manifold. Our main result is that the displacement energy is not greater than \(C r(M)\), where \(r(M)\) is the inner radius of \(M\), and \(C\) is a dimensional constant. As an immediate application, we study symplectic embedding problems of unit disk cotangent bundles. Moreover, combined with results in symplectic geometry, our main result shows the existence of short periodic billiard trajectories and short geodesic loops.