Hyperellipticity and systoles of Klein surfaces (Q438934)

The classical isoperimetric inequality bounds from above the area of a plane region in terms of the length of the boundary. For closed surfaces, the systolic inequalities bound from above the length of shortest closed geodesics in terms of the area of the surfaces. It was initiated by C. Loewner in 1949 for the torus endowed with any metric. Gromov proved the following systolic inequality for all aspherical surfaces \[ \mathrm{sys}^2\leq \frac{4}{3}\, \mathrm{area}, \] and pointed out that this inequality is sharp in the class of Finsler metrics. One natural question is whether it can be improved for the class of Riemannian metrics. The main result of this paper is such an improvement for Riemannian metrics on non-orientable surfaces whose double covers are hyperelliptic: \[ \mathrm{sys}^2\leq 1.333\, \mathrm{area}. \] (Note that 1.333 is strictly less than \(\frac{4}{3}\).) This class of surfaces include Dyck's surfaces which are connected sums of three real projective planes.