Geodesic rigidity of conformal connections on surfaces (Q495588)

In this paper the author studies the relationship between conformal structures and projective structures on surfaces. Recall that a \textit{projective structure} on a surface is the equivalence class of affine torsion-free connections where two connections are identified if and only if they share the same set of unparameterized geodesics. The author's main result is that on a closed oriented surface with negative Euler characteristic a conformal structure together with a compatible (so-called \textit{Weyl}) connection is uniquely determined by its induced projective structure; see Theorem 2 and Corollary 1. The proof is based on a construction which resembles twistor theory in the sense that the surface is replaced by a complex manifold \(Z\) admitting a fiber bundle structure over the surface such that the unique section of \(Z\) with holomorphic image gives rise to the conformal structure while the complex structure of \(Z\) itself encodes the projective structure on the surface. Finally, the author observes that a similar result cannot hold on the \(2\)-torus (having vanishing Euler characteristic) while continue to hold on the \(2\)-sphere (having positive Euler characteristic); see Proposition 3 and Theorem 3.