Closed geodesics on orbifolds (Q2488873)

Orbifolds are spaces which are locally finite quotients of manifolds. They naturally occur in many contexts. A natural problem is to generalize results from manifolds to orbifolds. This paper studies the question of existence of closed geodesics on compact Riemannian orbifolds. One of the main results says that if the orbifold is not developable (i.e., the quotient of a Riemannian manifold by a discrete isometry group), or its fundamental group contains an element of infinite order or is finite, then there exists a closed geodesic. Another result says that if a compact simply connected Riemannian orbifold whose rational cohomology group is not generated by a single element, then it admits infinitely many closed geodesics of positive length. These results are proved by generalizing the theory on free loop spaces on Riemannian manifolds to orbifolds. It also contains a valuable lengthy discussion of orbifolds.