Surfaces of section for geodesic flows of closed surfaces (Q6985505)

A surface of section for a nonvanishing vector field \(X\) on a closed connected three-manifold \(N\) with a flow \(\phi_t: N \rightarrow N\) is an immersed compact surface \(\Sigma\) in \(N\) whose boundary \(\partial \Sigma\) is tangent to \(X\) and whose interior is embedded in \(N - \partial \Sigma\) and transverse to \(X\).\N\NThe object of this paper is consider the existence of surfaces of section for geodesic flows of closed orientable Riemann surfaces. The authors construct surfaces of section that are either Birkhoff sections (so they intersect every orbit segment of sufficient length of the geodesic flow), or that they have hyperbolic components in \(\partial \Sigma\) that are limit sets of the orbits of the geodesic flow that do not return to \(\Sigma\).\N\NOne of the authors' main results is as follows: If \(M\) is a closed connected Riemannian manifold of genus \(G \geq 1\) with no contractible simple closed geodesics without conjugate points, then the geodesic vector field has a Birkhoff section \(\Sigma \rightarrow SM\), where \(SM\) is the unit tangent bundle of \(M\), \(\Sigma\) is a compact connected surface of genus one and with \(8G-1\) boundary components that cover waists. (A waist is a simple closed geodesic that is a local minimizer of the length functional over the free loop space.)\N\NThe proofs of the authors' results here use the notion of curve shortening flow described in [\textit{M. E. Gage}, Ann. Sci. E'c. Norm. Supér. (4) 23(2), 229--256 (1990; Zbl 0713.53022)].