Shapes of geodesic nets (Q2464820)

A geodesic net is an undirected graph, possibly with loops, and possibly with multiple edges, immersed into a Riemannian manifold, with geodesic edges. It is called stationary to mean that the unit outward tangent vectors at each vertex add to zero. The authors prove that in any compact \(n\)-dimensional Riemannian manifold, either there are infinitely many geometrically distinct stationary geodesic nets, or there is (1) a periodic geodesic of length not larger than \(( (n+1) \text{diam}(M^n))\) and (2) a periodic geodesic of length not larger than \((c_n \text{vol}(M^n)^{1/n})\), for some constant \(c_n\) depending only on the dimension \(n\). The authors shrink nets via length shortening flow, an idea originally pioneered to find closed geodesics by Birkhoff and developed by Croke. The authors attach a weighting to each edge, so that edges of higher weight evolve faster. They then consider varying the choice of weights. They relate homotopically nontrivial maps of spheres into the manifold (of lowest possible dimension) to certain elementary stationary geodesic nets called cages.