Closed geodesics in Alexandrov spaces of curvature bounded from above (Q535606)

Closed geodesics have been investigated mainly in the case of closed (i.e., compact and without boundary) Riemannian manifolds, while various results were obtained in the general case of metric spaces with certain special properties known as Busemann \(G\)-spaces. In the present paper, the author proves a local energy convexity of \(W^{1,2}\) maps into \(CAT(K)\) spaces. This energy convexity allows the author to produce closed geodesics in any Alexandrov space of curvature bounded from above, which also provides a generalized version of the Birkhoff-Lusternik theorem on the existence of non-trivial closed geodesics in the Alexandrov setting. More precisely, the main result of the paper states that, if \((X,d)\) is a closed Alexandrov space of curvature bounded from above by \(K\) and if the \(k_{0}\)-th homology group \(H_{k_{0}}(X)\) is nonzero for some \(k_{0}\geq1,\) then \((X,d)\) admits at least one non-trivial closed geodesic.