Structure of manifolds of nonpositive curvature. I
type: Item
instance of: scholarly article
title: Structure of manifolds of nonpositive curvature. I
zbMATH Open document ID: 0589.53047
DOI: 10.2307/1971373
author: Werner Ballmann
author: Michael Brin
author: Patrick Eberlein
published in: Annals of Mathematics. Second Series
publication date: 1985-01-01T00:00:00Z
review text: Let (M,g) be a compact Riemannian manifold, without boundary, of nonpositive sectional curvature. Let u be a vector in the unit tangent bundle SM of M. We define rank(u) to be the dimension of the space of all parallel Jacobi fields along the geodesic \(\gamma_ U: R\to M\) which has initial velocity u. The minimum of rank(u) over all \(u\in SM\) is called the rank of M. Clearly, \(1\leq rank(M)\leq \dim (M)\). From this we conclude that rank(M) can be considered as a measurement of the flatness of M since a parallel field X along \(\gamma_ u\) is a Jacobi field if and only if the sectional curvature of the planes \(\gamma_ u(t)\wedge X(t)\) are zero for all \(t\in {\mathbb{R}}\). The Riemannian manifold (M,g) is flat if \(rank(M)=\dim (M)\). Therefore a compact surface of nonpositive curvature has rank one unless it is a torus or a Klein bottle. The geodesic flow \(g^ t\) of M acts on the unit tangent bundle SM by translating a unit vector u along the geodesic \(\gamma_ u\) to the vector \(\gamma_ u(t)\). The Liouville measure \(d\mu =dm \times d\lambda\), which is the product of the Riemannian volume dm on M and the Lebesgue measure \(d\lambda\) on the unit sphere is preserved under \(g^ t\). A measure preserving flow \(g^ t\) in a measure space (X,\(\mu)\) (in our case \(X=SM)\) is called ergodic if any measurable subset A, such that \(g^ t(A)=A mod 0\) for any t, has either measure 0 or full measure. A function \(f: X\to {\mathbb{R}}\) is called a first integral if f is constant along orbits. The main result of this paper can be stated as follows: If M has rank k\(>1\), then (a) \(g^ t\) is not ergodic; moreover there exist k-1 functionally independent differentiable first integrals defined on an open dense, invariant subset of SM. (b) Every geodesic in the universal covering space of M is contained in a k-flat, i.e., a totally geodesic and isometrically embedded copy of the k-dimensional Euclidean space \(e^ k\). (c) The vectors tangent to totally geodesic and i…
Mathematics Subject Classification ID: 53C20
Mathematics Subject Classification ID: 37D40
Mathematics Subject Classification ID: 53D25
zbMATH DE Number: 3947114
zbMATH Keywords: nonpositive sectional curvature
zbMATH Keywords: Jacobi fields
zbMATH Keywords: first integrals
zbMATH Keywords: geodesic
zbMATH Keywords: k-flat
zbMATH Keywords: totally geodesic
zbMATH Keywords: fundamental group
MaRDI profile type: MaRDI publication profile
full work available at URL: https://doi.org/10.2307/1971373
OpenAlex ID: W4244992316
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description: scientific article; zbMATH DE number 3947114