On a generic property of geodesic flows

The author considers the long standing problem of when a compact Riemannian manifold \(M\) admits infinitely many geometrically distinct closed geodesics. Gromoll and Meyer showed that this is always the case if the sequence of Betti numbers with respect to some field \(F\) of the free loop space \(\Lambda M\) is unbounded. For \(F= \mathbb{Q}\) Vigué-Poirrier and Sullivan showed that the Betti number of \(\Lambda M\) are bounded if and only if the rational cohomology algebra is generated by a single element. For manifolds not covered by these results, e.g. spheres and projective spaces, the stability properties of periodic geodesics become important. It was previously known that a generic \(C^ 4\) Riemannian metric on a compact simply connected Riemannian manifold has infinitely many geometrically distinct closed geodesics. For a closed geodesic \(c\) in a compact Riemannian manifold \(M\) let \(P_ c\) denote the linearized Poincaré map and define Poincaré exponents \(0\leq \lambda_ 1< \lambda_ 2<\dots< \lambda_ \ell\leq 1/2\) by the property that \(\pm \exp(2\pi \lambda_ j)\), \(1\leq j\leq\ell\), are the eigenvalues of \(P_ c\). A closed geodesic \(c\) is called prime if it is not an iterate of a closed geodesic of smaller period. A Riemannian metric is said to be strongly bumpy if for every prime closed geodesic \(c\) the eigenvalues of \(P_ c\) are all simple and if any finite subset of the union of Poincaré exponents over all prime closed geodesics is algebraically independent. The author proves Theorem 1. The subset of strongly bumpy Riemannian metrics on a compact simply connected manifold is a residual subset of the set of Riemannian metrics with the \(C^ r\) topology, where \(2\leq r\leq\infty\). In a previous work the author showed that for a compact Riemannian manifold with only finitely many geometrically distinct closed geodesics there is a relation between the average indices of the prime closed geodesics. In this article the author shows that for a strongly bumpy Riemannian metric this relation would imply an algebraic dependence relation of Poincaré exponents. From this contradiction he obtains Theorem 2. A strongly bumpy Riemannian metric on a compact simply connected manifold admits infinitely many geometrically distinct closed geodesics. As an immediate corollary of Theorems 1 and 2 one has Theorem 3. A \(C^ r\) generic Riemannian metric on a compact simply connected manifold admits infinitely many geometrically distinct closed geodesics for \(2\leq r\leq \infty\).

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