Existence and nonexistence of half-geodesics on S^2

DOI10.1090/PROC/12918MaRDI QIDQ2802125zbMATH OpenOpenAlexFDO

Authors Ian M. Adelstein

Publication date 25 April 2016

Published in Proceedings of the American Mathematical Society (Search for Journal in Brave)

Full work available at URL https://arxiv.org/abs/1408.6216

zbMATH Keywords

geodesicshalf-geodesicssphere

Mathematics Subject Classification ID

Geodesics in global differential geometry (53C22)

Abstract: In this paper we study half-geodesics, those closed geodesics that minimize on any subinterval of length $l(gamma)/2$. For each nonnegative integer $n$, we construct Riemannian manifolds diffeomorphic to $S^2$ admitting exactly $n$ half-geodesics. Additionally, we construct a sequence of Riemannian manifolds, each of which is diffeomorphic to $S^2$ and admits no half-geodesics, yet which converge in the Gromov-Hausdorff sense to a limit space with infinitely many half-geodesics.

Review text

It is a classical and fundamental problem in differential geometry to prove existence of closed geodesics, especially when the fundamental group of the Riemannian manifold is trivial. The most basic example is the sphere. In this paper, the author studies half-geodesics on the sphere \(S^2\), where a closed geodesic of total length \(L\) is called a half-geodesic if it is distance minimizing on every subinterval of length \(L/2\). For each nonnegative integer \(n\), the author constructs a Riemannian metric on \(S^2\) which admits exactly \(n\) half-geodesics, and also constructs a sequence of Riemannian metrics on \(S^2\) which does not admit any half-geodesic, but converges in the sense of Gromov-Hausdorff to a limit space which admits infinitely many half-geodesic.

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Cites work

• A Panoramic View of Riemannian Geometry
• A Zoll counterexample to a geodesic length conjecture
• Convergence and the length spectrum
• Finiteness Theorems for Riemannian Manifolds
• Geodesics on \(S^ 2\) and periodic points of annulus homeomorphisms
• scientific article; zbMATH DE number 3070071 (Why is no real title available?)
• Manifolds without \(\tfrac {1}{k}\)-geodesics
• Morse Theory. (AM-51)
• ON THE EXISTENCE OF CLOSED GEODESICS ON TWO-SPHERES
• Periodic geodesics on compact Riemannian manifolds

Cited in

(8)

• Manifolds without \(\tfrac {1}{k}\)-geodesics
• Morse theory for the uniform energy
• Minimizing closed geodesics on polygons and disks
• Minimizing geodesic nets and critical points of distance
• Closed geodesics on doubled polygons
• Closed geodesics on incomplete surfaces
• Characterizing round spheres using half-geodesics
• The Geodesics for Poincaré’s Half-Plane: A Nonstandard Derivation

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