Adiabatic compactness for holomorphic curves with boundary on nearby Lagrangians

In his 1989 paper, Floer established a connection between holomorphic strips with boundary on a Lagrangian $L$ and a small Hamiltonian push-off $L_{f}$, and gradient flow lines for the function $f$. The present paper studies the compactness theory for holomorphic curves $u_{n}$ whose boundary components lie on Hamiltonian perturbations $L_{n}^{1},\dots,L^{N}_{n}$ of a fixed Lagrangian $L$, where each sequence of nearby Lagrangians $L^{j}_{n}$ converges to $L$ as $n\to\infty$. Generalizing earlier work of Oh, Fukaya, Ekholm, and Zhu, we prove that the limit of a sequence of such holomorphic maps is a configuration consisting of holomorphic curves with boundary on $L$ joined by gradient flow lines connecting points on the boundary of holomorphic pieces. The key new result is an exponential estimate analyzing the interface between the holomorphic parts and the gradient flow line parts.