Short homotopically independent loops on surfaces (Q2453740)

The length of the shortest geodesic of a Riemannian manifold is called the systole of the manifold. Estimates on the lengths of short geodesics and on the number of geodesics whose lengths bounded by suitable functions have been studied by several people. One point emphasized in this paper is to find short geodesics based at one common point. For example, the main result says that for every closed Riemannian surface of genus \(g\geq 2\) and area normalized to \(g\), there are at least \(\log g+1\) homotopically independent loops based at the same point of length at most \(C \log g\), where \(C\) is a universal constant. Similar results are obtained for metric graphs.