On the Lagrange and Markov dynamical spectra for geodesic flows on surfaces with negative curvature (Q6167213)

The authors investigate the dynamical Lagrange and Markov spectra determined by a typical function \(f : SX^{g} \rightarrow \mathbb{R}\), where \(X^{g}\) is a complete surface of pinched negative Gaussian curvature relative to a smooth metric \(g\) and \(SX^{g}\) denotes the unit tangent bundle of \(X^{g}\). They show that typically both spectra contain open intervals in \(\mathbb{R}\). Let \(M\) be a smooth manifold and let \(\phi\) be a smooth vector field on \(M\) with flow \(\{\phi^{t} : t \in \mathbb{R} \}\). Given a smooth function \(f : M \rightarrow \mathbb{R}\) and a point \(x \in M\) define \(m_{\phi,f}(x) = \sup_{t \in \mathbb{R}} f(\phi^{t}x)\) and \(\ell_{\phi , f}(x) = \limsup_{t \rightarrow + \infty}~ f(\phi^{t}x)\). Let \((M,\phi,f) = \{m_{\phi,f}(x) : x \in M \}\) and \((L,\phi,f) = \{ \ell_{\phi,f}(x) : x \in M \}\). These are respectively the Markov and Lagrange spectra determined by \(f\). One can show that \((L,\phi,f) \subset M(\phi,f)\). Now let \(X\) be a smooth surface and let \(\mathcal{G}^{3}(X)\) denote the space of \(C^{3}\) Riemannian metrics on \(X\). For \(g \in \mathcal{G}^{3}(X)\) let \(\phi^{g}\) denote the geodesic vector field on \(SX^{g}\). The authors prove the following: Theorem. Given a metric \(g_{0} \in \mathcal{G}^{3}(X)\) with pinched negative curvature there exists, for metrics \(g\) arbitrarily close to \(g_{0}\), a dense and \(C^{2}\) open set \(\mathcal{H}_{g} \subset C^{2}(SX^{g},\mathbb{R})\) such that \((M,\phi^{g},f)\) and \((L,\phi^{g},f)\) contain open intervals for all \(f \in \mathcal{H}_{g}\). For \(g \in \mathcal{G}^{3}(X)\) let \(\pi_{g} : SX^{g} \rightarrow X^{g}\) denote the projection map. The authors obtain two additional results similar to the one above for the special case that \(f : SX^{g} \rightarrow \mathbb{R}\) has the form \(f = h \circ \pi_{g}\), where \(h \in C^{2}(X^{g}, \mathbb{R})\).