Geodesics in infinite dimensional Stiefel and Grassmann manifolds (Q715636)

The authors study the geometry of infinite dimensional Stiefel manifolds \(\text{St}(p,V)\) and Grassmann \(\text{Gr}(p,V)\) manifolds, where \(V\) denotes an infinite dimensional separable Hilbert space. The main result in this article is that any two points in these Stiefel or Grassmann manifolds can be connected by a minimal geodesic, i.e., they are geodesically convex spaces. Although it is known that \(\text{St}(p,V)\) is a metrically complete manifold, geodesic convexity is a highly non-trivial theorem for these infinite dimensional manifolds. In finite dimension, it would easily follow from the completeness by the theorem of Hopf-Rinow. For an infinite dimensional manifold, however, it has been shown that the Hopf Rinow theorem does not hold anymore and as a consequence, questions on metric and geodesic completeness have to be answered separately. In addition to the above mentioned result, the authors also characterize the cut locus on the Stiefel and Grassmann manifolds.