Existence of minimal flows on nonorientable surfaces

Abstract: Surfaces admitting flows all whose orbits are dense are called minimal. Minimal orientable surfaces were characterized by J.C. Beni`{e}re in 1998, leaving open the nonorientable case. This paper fills this gap providing a characterization of minimal nonorientable surfaces of finite genus. We also construct an example of a minimal nonorientable surface with infinite genus and conjecture that any nonorientable surface without combinatorial boundary is minimal.

Review text

A flow on a surface is called minimal if its orbits are dense. In [Feuilletage minimaux sur les surfaces non-compactes. Lyon: Université de Lyon (PhD Thesis) (1998)], \textit{J. C. Benière} proved that all noncompact orientable surfaces which are not embedded in the Euclidean plane possess a minimal flow. In this paper, the authors consider whether nonorientable surfaces admit a minimal flow or not. More precisely, a vector field \(X\) on a surface \(S\) is called minimal if its associated maximal flow is minimal. The authors prove that if \(S\) is an orientable noncompact surface of finite genus \(g \geq 1\) or a nonorientable noncompact surface of finite genus \(g \geq 4\), then there exists a real analytic complete vector field \(X\) on \(S\) which is minimal and area-preserving. Recall that \(X\) is area-preserving if there exists a non-degenerate and complete \(2\)-form \(\theta\) (an area form) such that the Lie derivative of \(\theta\) with respect to \(X\) is vanishing. The authors also show that there exist nonorientable surfaces of infinite genus which admit minimal area-preserving complete real analytic vector fields. Some remarks on compact surfaces related to minimal flows are as follows. There is nothing to say about the study of compact surfaces admitting minimal flows. According to the Poincaré-Hopf index theorem, if a compact surface \(S\) admits a smooth minimal flow, the Euler characteristics of \(S\) must be zero and therefore either \(S\) is the torus or the Klein bottle.

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