Diameter, width and thickness of spherical reduced convex bodies with an application to Wulff shapes (Q2181697)

In the present paper, the author studies lunes and convex sets on the sphere. Here, a subset \(C\) of the \(d\)-dimensional sphere \(S^d\) is called convex if it does not contain any pair of antipodal points and if for every two points in \(C\) also the arc connecting them (subset of the great circle connecting these two points such that it does not contain antipodal points) is contained in \(C\). Furthermore, \(C\) is called a convex body if its interior \(\operatorname{int}(C)\) (with respect to \(S^d\)) is non-empty. Moreover, a lune is a set \(L\subset S^d\) that can be written as \(L=G\cap H\), where \(G\) and \(H\) are different and not opposite hemispheres (intersection of \(S^d\) with a half-space) of \(S^d\). After introducing basic notions in Section 1, four results (claims) concerning thickness (or minimum width), diameter and extreme points are proven in Section 2. In Section 3, equivalences and relations between thickness and diameter of reduced bodies are presented. In Section 4, Wulff shapes are considered. Here, the Wulff shape \(\mathcal{W}_\gamma\) associated with the continuous function \(\gamma:S^d\to \mathbb{R}_+\) is the set \(\mathcal{W}_\gamma=\bigcap_{\theta\in S^d} \Gamma_{\gamma,\theta}\), where \(\Gamma_{\gamma,\theta}=\{x\in\mathbb{R}^{d+1}: x\cdot \theta \leq \gamma(\theta)\}\). For such a Wulff shape \(\mathcal{W}_\gamma\) and \(\theta\in S^d\) let \((\theta,w(\theta))\in S^d\times \mathbb{R}_+\) denote the unique intersection point of the boundary of \(\mathcal{W}_\gamma\) with the half-line in direction \(\theta\). The dual Wulff shape of \(\mathcal{W}_\gamma\), denoted by \(\mathcal{D} \mathcal{W}_\gamma\), is now the Wulff shape \(\mathcal{W}_{\bar{\gamma}}\) associated with \(\bar{\gamma}(\theta)=1/w(-\theta)\). A Wulff shape is called self-dual if \(\mathcal{W}_\gamma=\mathcal{D} \mathcal{W}_\gamma\). As an application of Proposition 2 from Section 3, equivalent conditions to the self-duality of a Wulff shape are given in Theorem 4. These conditions concern width, thickness and diameter of the spherical convex body induced by a Wulff shape. In particular this also answers a question posed by \textit{H. Han} and \textit{T. Nishimura} [``Wulff shapes and their duals'', RIMS, Kyoto University (2017)].