Closed geodesics on orbifolds of nonpositive or nonnegative curvature (Q464258)

This paper is concerned with the existence of closed geodesics on compact orbifolds. It is well known that every compact Riemannian manifold contains a closed geodesic. The first such result for orbifolds appeared in the reviewer's Ph.D. thesis [\textit{J.~E. Borzellino}, Riemannian geometry of orbifolds. Ph.D. Thesis. Los Angeles, CA, USA: University of California, Los Angeles (1992)] and relied on the behavior of minimizing geodesics in orbifolds. See also [\textit{J. E. Borzellino}, Indiana Univ. Math. J. 42, No. 1, 37--53 (1993; Zbl 0801.53031)]. This result assumed the underlying space of the orbifold was not simply connected and thus, did not go very far in addressing the more general existence question. \textit{K. Guruprasad} and \textit{A. Haefliger} [Topology 45, No. 3, 611--641 (2006; Zbl 1099.53035)] used a Morse theoretic approach and were able to prove the existence of a closed geodesic on orbifolds that are not global quotients, or whose orbifold fundamental group \(\pi_1^{\text{orb}}\) is finite or contains an element of infinite order. In this paper, the author extends this result by proving that a compact global quotient orbifold admits a closed geodesic whenever \(\pi_1^{\text{orb}}\) is finite or contains a hyperbolic element. As a corollary, the author shows that any compact Riemannian orbifold having nonnegative or nonpositive sectional curvature admits a closed geodesic.