Sharp upper bounds on the length of the shortest closed geodesic on complete punctured spheres of finite area (Q2157352)

This interesting paper provides universal upper bounds on the length of shortest closed geodesics in non-compact surfaces endowed with a complete Riemannian or (not necessarily reversible) Finsler metric having finite area. In a few cases, the bounds are sharp and examples of extremal metrics are described. The bounds are given by a constant times the square root of the area; the constant depends on the topology of the surface (i.e., genus and number of punctures) and by the kind of metric considered (Riemannian, reversible Finsler, general Finsler). Bounds on the length of shortest closed geodesics in the case of compact surfaces (necessarily of finite area) where already available in the literature, even though they are known to be sharp only for the torus, the projective plane and the Klein bottle; curiously enough, the optimal bound for the sphere has not yet been determined, even though it is conjectured to be \(2^{1/2}3^{1/4}\sqrt{\mathrm{area}(S^2)}\). For non-compact surfaces endowed with a Riemannian metric having finite area, up to now the best bounds were provided by \textit{I. Beach} and \textit{R. Rotman} [Proc. Am. Math. Soc. 148, No. 12, 5355--5367 (2020; Zbl 1455.53068)]; they gave a bound of the form \(4\sqrt{2}\sqrt{\mathrm{area}(\Sigma)}\) for a surface \(\Sigma\) with one puncture, and of the form \(2\sqrt{2}\sqrt{\mathrm{area}(\Sigma)}\) for surfaces with at least two punctures. This paper gives better bounds of the form \(c_\Sigma\sqrt{\mathrm{area}(\Sigma)}\) when \(\Sigma\) is a sphere with \(k\ge 3\) punctures, and in some cases the bounds are optimal. More precisely, the authors prove that: in the Riemannian case, one can take \(c_\Sigma=2^{1/2}3^{1/4}\) when \(k=3\) and \(c_\Sigma=2\cdot 3^{-1/4}\) when \(k\ge 4\), and these bounds are optimal for \(k=3\),~\(4\); in the reversible Finsler case, one can take \(c_\Sigma=2^{-1/2}3^{1/2}\pi^{1/2}\) when \(k=3\) and \(c_\Sigma=\pi^{1/2}\) when \(k\ge 4\), and these bounds are optimal for \(k=4\),~\(5\),~\(6\); in the general Finsler case, one can take \(c_\Sigma=2^{1/2}\pi^{1/2}\) when \(k=3\) and \(c_\Sigma=2\cdot 3^{-1/2}\pi^{1/2}\) when \(k\ge 4\). In the Riemannian case the authors also give a general bound of the form \[c_\Sigma=C\frac{\log(g+2)}{\sqrt{g+k+1}}\] when \(\Sigma\) is a surface of genus \(g\) with \(k\) punctures, where \(C\) is an explicit universal constant. When \(g=0\) and \(k\ge 3\) this can be reduced to \(c_\Sigma=4\sqrt{2/k}\). The main idea in the proofs consists in passing to a ramified torus cover and use the known bounds on the systole (the shortest length of a noncontractible closed geodesic) of a torus endowed with a Riemannian (respectively, reversible Finsler and general Finsler) metric.