Reflection in a strictly convex bounded planar billiard acts on the space of oriented lines and preserves a standard area form. A caustic is a curve C whose tangent lines are reflected by the billiard to lines tangent to C. The famous Birkhoff conjecture states that the only strictly convex billiards with a foliation by closed caustics near the boundary are ellipses. By Lazutkin’s theorem, there always exists a Cantor family of closed caustics approaching the boundary. In the present paper, we deal with an open billiard, whose boundary is a strictly convex embedded (non-closed) curve $\gamma $. We prove that there exists a domain U adjacent to $\gamma $ from the convex side and a $C^\infty $-smooth foliation of $U\cup \gamma $ whose leaves are $\gamma $ and (non-closed) caustics of the billiard. This generalizes a previous result by Melrose on the existence of a germ of foliation as above. We show that there exists a continuum of above foliations by caustics whose germs at each point in $\gamma $ are pairwise different. We prove a more general version of this statement for $\gamma $ being an (immersed) arc. It also applies to a billiard bounded by a closed strictly convex curve $\gamma $ and yields infinitely many ‘immersed’ foliations by immersed caustics. For the proof of the above results, we state and prove their analogue for a special class of area-preserving maps generalizing billiard reflections: the so-called $C^{\infty }$-lifted strongly billiard-like maps. We also prove a series of results on conjugacy of billiard maps near the boundary for open curves of the above type.

We prove that every non-degenerate Reeb flow on a closed contact manifold M admitting a strong symplectic filling W with vanishing first Chern class carries at least two geometrically distinct closed orbits provided that the positive equivariant symplectic homology of W satisfies a mild condition. Under further assumptions, we establish the existence of two geometrically distinct closed orbits on any contact finite quotient of M. Several examples of such contact manifolds are provided, like displaceable ones, unit cosphere bundles, prequantisation circle bundles, Brieskorn spheres and toric contact manifolds. We also show that this condition on the equivariant symplectic homology is preserved by boundary connected sums of Liouville domains. As a byproduct of one of our applications, we prove a sort of Lusternik–Fet theorem for Reeb flows on the unit cosphere bundle of not rationally aspherical manifolds satisfying suitable additional assumptions.

We address the problem of computing the fundamental group of a symplectic ${{S}^{1}}$-manifold for non-Hamiltonian actions on compact manifolds, and for Hamiltonian actions on non-compact manifolds with a proper moment map. We generalize known results for compact manifolds equipped with a Hamiltonian ${{S}^{1}}$-action. Several examples are presented to illustrate our main results.

We prove that a Hamiltonian $p\in {{C}^{\infty }}({{T}^{*}}{{\mathbf{R}}^{n}})$ is locally integrable near a non-degenerate critical point ${{\rho }_{0}}$ of the energy, provided that the fundamental matrix at ${{\rho }_{0}}$ has rationally independent eigenvalues, none purely imaginary. This is done by using Birkhoff normal forms, which turn out to be convergent in the ${{C}^{\infty }}$ sense. We also give versions of the Lewis-Sternberg normal form near a hyperbolic fixed point of a canonical transformation. Then we investigate the complex case, showing that when $p$ is holomorphic near ${{\rho }_{0}}\in {{T}^{*}}{{\mathbf{C}}^{n}},$ then Re $p$ becomes integrable in the complex domain for real times, while the Birkhoff series and the Birkhoff transforms may not converge, i.e.,$p$ may not be integrable. These normal forms also hold in the semi-classical frame.

In this article we are concerned with how to compute the cohomology ring of a symplectic quotient by a circle action using the information we have about the cohomology of the original manifold and some data at the fixed point set of the action. Our method is based on the Tolman-Weitsman theorem which gives a characterization of the kernel of the Kirwan map. First we compute a generating set for the kernel of the Kirwan map for the case of product of compact connected manifolds such that the cohomology ring of each of them is generated by a degree two class. We assume the fixed point set is isolated; however the circle action only needs to be “formally Hamiltonian”. By identifying the kernel, we obtain the cohomology ring of the symplectic quotient. Next we apply this result to some special cases and in particular to the case of products of two dimensional spheres. We show that the results of Kalkman and Hausmann-Knutson are special cases of our result.