On geodesic extendibility and the space of compact balls of length spaces (Q1984535)

This paper concerns the relationship of a strongly geodesically complete length space and the metric space (with the Hausdorff metric) of its compact balls. The authors define a locally compact length space as strongly geodesically complete, if for any point in it, every geodesic segment that starts at the point can be extended as a geodesic segment of any length. The main result of the paper is that the map, \(f: (X\times \mathbb{R}_{\geq 0})\to (\Sigma(X),d_H)\), \(f(x,t)=\bar{B}_t(x)\), is an isometry iff (\(X, d\)) is strongly geodesically complete. Here, (\(X, d\)) is a locally compact complete length space and \((\Sigma(X),d_H)\) is the space of compact balls of (\(X, d\)) with the Hausdorff metric \(d_H\). The space \(X\times \mathbb{R}_{\geq 0}\) is endowed with the taxicab metric \(d_T\), i.e., \(d_T((x,t),(y,s))=d(x,y)+|t-s|\). The authors also give a metric quotient version of the result. The last part of the paper shows that \(\mathrm{Isom}(\Sigma(X),d_H)\cong\mathrm{Isom}(X, d)\), if \((X, d)\) is a strongly geodesically complete length space with having unique midpoints.