Blocking light in compact Riemannian manifolds (Q2464813)

A Riemannian manifold is said to have finite blocking if for any two points \(x\) and \(y\) of the manifold, there is a finite set of points of the manifold so that every light ray from \(x\) to \(y\) (travelling along a geodesic) will strike a point of that finite set. For example, compact flat Riemannian manifolds have finite blocking. The authors prove that compact quotients of Euclidean buildings also have finite blocking. The authors further prove that nonpositively curved compact Riemannian manifolds have finite blocking just when they are flat. They conjecture (1) that the compact Riemannian manifolds which have finite blocking are precisely the flat ones, and (2) that compact Riemannian manifolds with similar blocking properties to compact rank one Riemannian symmetric spaces are isometric to such spaces (up to constant rescaling of the metric). They provide some evidence to support these conjectures. To prove their theorem on nonpositively curvature, they employ a theorem of Mañé on topological entropy. Their work on blocking properties of compact rank one Riemannian symmetric spaces employs work of Berger and Besse on the Blaschke conjecture.