The structure of the conjugate locus of a general point on ellipsoids and certain Liouville manifolds (Q823803)

The present paper is partly a continuation of a previous work, where the cut loci of points on certain Liouville manifolds, diffeomorphic to the sphere, are studied. The restrictions imposed are a bit stronger, therefore the obtained results are significantly better. For a Riemannian manifold \(M\) of dimension \(n\), consider an \(n\)-dimensional vector space \(\mathcal F,\) generated by a set of functions \(\{F_k\}_{1\leq k\leq n}\) on the cotangent bundle \(T^*M.\) A Liouville manifold is a pair \((M,\mathcal F)\) such that: \([L_1]\) each \(F\in \mathcal F\) is fiberwise a homogeneous quadratic polynomial \([L_2]\) these quadratic forms are simultaneously normalizable on each fiber \([L_3]\) \(\mathcal F\) is commutative with respect to the Poisson bracket \([L_4]\) \(\mathcal F\) contains the energy function \(E\) (Hamiltonian of the geodesic flow) \([L_5]\) \(\{F\big|_{T_p^*M}: \ F\in \mathcal F\}\) is \(n\)-dimensional at some point \(p\in M.\) Each Liouville manifold, investigated in this article, is constructed from \(n+1\) constants \(a_0>a_1>\ldots>a_0>0\) and a positive smooth function \(A(\lambda)\) on the interval \([a_n,a_0].\) In the case \(A(\lambda)=\sqrt \lambda\), the Liouville manifold \(M\) becomes isometric to an ellipsoid. A point \(p_0\in M\) is said to be \textit{general} if \[p_0\notin N_k=\{p\in M: \ rank (F_k)_p\leq 1\} , \ \ \text{for any} \ \ 1\leq k\leq n-1,\] where the submanifolds \(N_k\) generalize the ellipsoids of codimension-one in \(M\), that occur when \(M\) is an ellipsoid. Imposing a monotonicity condition on the function \(A(\lambda)\), the structure of the conjugate locus of a general point \(p_0\in M\) is obtained. Additionally, the position of zeros of the Jacobi fields are obtained, resulting an interesting asymptotic nature of the distribution of these zeros. The major part of the singularities on the conjugate locus are \textit{cuspidal edges}. The remaining singularities, which appear as the end points of the cuspidal edges, turned out to be \textit{\(D_4^+\) Lagrangian singularities}. It should be also mentioned that the \(D_4^+\) Lagrangian singularity is in some sense stable: one could observe this type of singularity on conjugate loci for manifolds ``close'' to the rather special ones investigated in this article. As the authors declare: the obtained results would be a higher-dimensional part of the \textit{last geometric statement of Jacobi}, which says that the conjugate locus of a non-umbilic point of the two-dimensional ellipsoid has exactly four cusps. An open question emerges, since in this paper are found only cuspidal edges and \(D^+_4\) Lagrangian singularities as singularities on the conjugate loci. \textit{Are there any manifolds, whose conjugate loci have \(D_4^{-}\) or \(D_k\), \(k\geq 5,\) Lagrangian singularities?}