Symplecto-rigidity and bootstrap for Anosov symplectomorphisms and contact Anosov flows

Abstract

This paper is a sequel to the authors' paper on rigidity of higher dimensional contact Anosov flows~[GRH]. At the time the authors were unaware of much earlier work of Hamenstädt~[Ham] devoted to the same problem. The methods of~[GRH] and~[Ham] are overlapping but not entirely the same. In this paper we strengthen some the results of Hamenstädt, by further bootstrapping the regularity of the conjugacy of 2-pinched contact Anosov flows. We also introduce a notion of symplecto-rigidity for symplectomorphisms and prove that some Anosov diffeomorphisms are symplecto-rigid. We further combine symplecto-rigidity with various rigidity techniques to establish a number of smooth rigidity results of Anosov symplectomorphisms. Some new phenomena are present in the realm of Anosov symplectomorphism. For example, while the well-known de la Llave example on the 4-torus demonstrates absence of rigidity in the space of smooth Anosov diffeomorphisms, however, we prove that it is rigid in the space of Anosov sympelctomorphisms.