Coarse hyperbolicity and closed orbits for quasigeodesic flows (Q1643386): Difference between revisions

The main result of this paper is what the author calls the Closed Orbits Theorem, which establishes that every quasigeodesic flow on a closed hyperbolic 3-manifold contains a closed orbit, as conjectured by Calegari. A flow \(\Phi:\mathbb{R}\times M\to M\) defined on a manifold is \textit{quasigeodesic} if each orbit lifts to a quasigeodesic in the universal cover \(\widetilde{M}\), i.e., each lifted orbit admits a parametrization \(\gamma:\mathbb{R}\to \widetilde{M}\) such that \[ \frac{1}{k}d(\gamma(s),\gamma(t))-\varepsilon\leq|s-t|\leq kd(\gamma(x),\gamma(y))+\varepsilon \] for constants \(k>0\), \(\varepsilon>0\) that may depend on the orbit. To prove the existence of closed orbits, the author, instead of addressing directly the 3-dimensional problem, reduces the problem to a 2-dimensional one. In particular, he studies the space of orbits of the lifted flow \(\widetilde{\Phi}\) to the universal cover \(\widetilde{M}\simeq \mathbb{H}^3\). This space of orbits is a topological plane \(P\) that carries a natural action of \(\pi_1(M)\). The properties of recurrence and periodicity of the flow \(\Phi\) can be seen in terms of this action and, in particular, each closed trajectory of \(\Phi\) corresponds to a point in \(P\) which is fixed by a non-trivial element of \(\pi_1(M)\). To find such an element, the author studies a pair of decompositions \(\mathcal{D}^{\pm}\) of \(P\), induced by the orbits of \(\widetilde{\Phi}\), and their extensions to the compactification \(\mathbf{P}=P\sqcup S^1_ u\) of \(P\) by Calegari's \textit{universal circle}, which is a topological disk. At the end of the paper the author presents some questions and conjectures.