Closed 1/2-elasticae in the hyperbolic plane (Q6111118)

The authors consider the functional: \(\mathcal{B}_{\lambda }:\gamma \rightarrow \int_{\gamma }(\sqrt{\left\vert \kappa \right\vert }+\lambda )\), defined on the set of convex curves \(\gamma \) in the hyperbolic plane \( \mathcal{H}^{2}=\{x\in \mathcal{N}^{+}\mid \overrightarrow{x}\cdot \overrightarrow{x}-x_{1}x_{1}+x_{2}x_{2}+x_{3}x_{3}=-1\}\), \(\mathcal{N}^{+}\) being the causal cone of the Minkowski 3-space \(\mathbb{R}^{1,2}\) defined as: \(\mathcal{N}^{+}=\{x\in \mathbb{R}^{1,2}\mid \overrightarrow{x}\cdot \overrightarrow{x}\leq 0\), \(x_{1}>0\}\). In the functional \(\mathcal{B} _{\lambda }\), the constant \(\lambda \) is a Lagrange multiplier encoding the conservation of the length during the variation and \(\kappa \) is the geodesic curvature of the curve. The authors define a \(1/2\)-elastica with multiplier \(\lambda \in \mathbb{R}\) as a convex curve in \(\mathcal{H}^{2}\) of class \(C^{4}\) which is a critical point of the above functional \(\mathcal{ B}_{\lambda }\), with respect to compactly supported variations through convex curves. They recall that every simple closed smooth curve in \( \mathcal{H}^{2}\) possesses at least four hyperbolic vertices, and a convex curve \(\gamma \) parameterized by its arc length is a \(1/2\)-elastica with multiplier \(\lambda \) if and only if there exists a non-zero vector \( \xi \in \mathbb{R}^{1,2}\), called the momentum, such that \[\frac{1}{2\mu } \gamma +\frac{\overset{.}{\mu }}{2\mu ^{2}}\gamma ^{\prime }-(\lambda +\frac{ \mu }{2})\gamma \times \overset{.}{\gamma }=\overrightarrow{\xi },\] where \( \mu =\sqrt{\kappa }\) is the Blaschke invariant of \(\gamma \). They distinguish three types of curves with positive constant curvature \(\kappa \), depending on whether \(\kappa >1\) (elliptic type), \(\kappa =1\) (parabolic type) or \(\kappa <1\) (hyperbolic type) and recall that the only closed ones, namely circles, are those of elliptic type (i.e., \(\kappa >1\)). They prove existence and non-existence results for equivalence classes of closed \(1/2\)-elasticae with multiplier \(\lambda \) and \(\kappa >0\) constant, according to the position of \(\lambda \) with respect to \(-1\) or \(-2\sqrt[4]{27}\). The authors then consider convex curves whose Blaschke invariant \(\mu \) is a non-constant periodic solution to the conservation equation \[\overset{.}{\mu }^{2}=-\mu ^{2}(\mu ^{4}+4\lambda \mu ^{3}+4[\lambda ^{2}-\overrightarrow{ \xi }\cdot \overrightarrow{\xi }]\mu ^{2}-1),\] which they call \(\mathcal{B}\)-curves. A \(\mathcal{B}\)-curve is a BS-curve (resp., BL- or BT-curve) if its momentum is space-like (resp., light-like or time-like). The main part of the paper gives explicit parametrizations by quadratures and several representations of these \(\mathcal{B}\)-curves. The authors illustrate their results with figures.