Moment Maps and Combinatorial Invariants of Hamiltonian Tn-spaces

Victor Guillemin

The action of a compact Lie group, G, on a compact sympletic manifold gives rise to some remarkable combinatorial invariants. The simplest and most interesting of these is the moment polytope, a convex polyhedron which sits inside the dual of the Lie algebra of G. One of the main goals of this monograph is to describe what kinds of geometric information are encoded in this polytope. For instance, the first chapter is largely devoted to the Delzant theorem, which says that there is a one-one correspondence between certain types of moment polytopes and certain types of symplectic G-spaces. (One of the most challenging unsolved problems in symplectic geometry is to determine to what extent Delzant’s theorem is true of every compact symplectic G-Space.) The moment polytope also encodes quantum information about the actions of G. Using the methods of geometric quantization, one can...