Monotone homotopies and contracting discs on Riemannian surfaces

DOI10.1142/S1793525318500103MaRDI QIDQ4565336zbMATH OpenOpenAlexWikidataFDO

Authors Gregory R. Chambers, Regina Rotman

Publication date 12 June 2018

Published in Journal of Topology and Analysis (Search for Journal in Brave)

Full work available at URL https://arxiv.org/abs/1311.2995

zbMATH Keywords

metric geometryquantitative topologyhomotopies of curves on surfaces.

Mathematics Subject Classification ID

Global Riemannian geometry, including pinching (53C20) Spaces of embeddings and immersions (58D10) Homotopy groups (55Q99)

Abstract: We prove a "gluing" theorem for monotone homotopies; a monotone homotopy is a homotopy through simple contractible closed curves which themselves are pairwise disjoint. We show that two monotone homotopies which have appropriate overlap can be replaced by a single monotone homotopy. The ideas used to prove this theorem are used in [CL2] to prove an analogous result for cycles, which forms a critical step in their proof of the existence of minimal surfaces in complete non-compact manifolds of finite volume. We also show that, if monotone homotopies exist, then fixed point contractions through short curves exist. In particular, suppose that $gamma$ is a simple closed curve of a Riemannian surface, and that there exists a monotone contraction which covers a disc which $gamma$ bounds consisting of curves of length $leqL$. If $epsilon>0$ and $qingamma$, then there exists a homotopy that contracts $gamma$ to $q$ over loops that are based at $q$ and have length bounded by $3L+2d+epsilon$, where $d$ is the diameter of the surface. If the surface is a disc, and if $gamma$ is the boundary of this disc, then this bound can be improved to $L+2d+epsilon$.

Recommendations

• Constructing monotone homotopies and sweepouts
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Cites work

• scientific article; zbMATH DE number 437296 (Why is no real title available?)
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Cited in

(5)

• Contracting thin disks
• Contracting the boundary of a Riemannian 2-disc
• Existence of minimal hypersurfaces in complete manifolds of finite volume
• Computing optimal homotopies over a spiked plane with polygonal boundary
• Constructing monotone homotopies and sweepouts

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