Spaces of geodesics: Products, coverings, connectedness (Q1906234)

This paper continues the authors' study of geodesics of a manifold with linear connection with special regard to tree problems [see also the first and third author, ibid. 38, No. 1, 87-99 (1991; Zbl 0789.58016)]. First, the space of geodesics of the product of two manifolds is studied and the conditions for it to be locally Euclidean provided the same hypothesis about the members of the product are given. The authors construct the space of geodesics of \(\mathbb{R} \times M\), where \(M\) is a manifold with linear connection. Second, for a geodesic covering map which takes the image of each geodesic onto the image of a geodesic they find the conditions for the space of geodesics of the covering manifold to be a manifold. The last part of this paper contains a sufficient condition, imposed on the space of geodesics, for a manifold to be geodesically connected. This result is applied to Hadamard manifolds generalizing this notion by defining a pseudo-Hadamard manifold. In particular they obtain a new proof of a venerable result: \(\mathbb{H}^n\) (hyperbolic \(n\)-space) and any standard pseudo-Euclidean \(\mathbb{R}^n\) are geodesically connected.