No Arabic abstract
This note proves that any locally extremal non-self-conjugate geodesic loop in a Riemannian manifold is a closed geodesic. As a consequence, any complete and non-contractible Riemannian manifold with diverging injectivity radii along diverging sequences and without points conjugate to themselves, possesses a minimizing closed geodesic.
We prove that any planar 4-web defines a unique projective structure in the plane in such a way that the leaves of the foliations are geodesics of this projective structure. We also find conditions for the projective structure mentioned above to contain an affine symmetric connection, and conditions for a planar 4-web to be equivalent to a geodesic 4-web on an affine symmetric surface. Similar results are obtained for planar d-webs, d > 4, provided that additional d-4 second-order invariants vanish.
{em Riemannian cubics} are curves in a manifold $M$ that satisfy a variational condition appropriate for interpolation problems. When $M$ is the rotation group SO(3), Riemannian cubics are track-summands of {em Riemannian cubic splines}, used for motion planning of rigid bodies. Partial integrability results are known for Riemannian cubics, and the asymptotics of Riemannian cubics in SO(3) are reasonably well understood. The mathematical properties and medium-term behaviour of Riemannian cubics in SO(3) are known to be be extremely rich, but there are numerical methods for calculating Riemannian cubic splines in practice. What is missing is an understanding of the short-term behaviour of Riemannian cubics, and it is this that is important for applications. The present paper fills this gap by deriving approximations to nearly geodesic Riemannian cubics in terms of elementary functions. The high quality of these approximations depends on mathematical results that are specific to Riemannian cubics.
A conjecture of Burns and Knieper asks whether a 2-plane with a metric without conjugate points, and with a geodesic foliation whose lines are at bounded Hausdorff distance, is necessarily flat. We prove this conjecture in two cases: under the hypothesis that the plane admits total curvature, and under the hypothesis of visibility at some point. Along the way, we show that all geodesic line foliations on a Riemannian 2-plane must be homeomorphic to the standard one.
In a Riemannian manifold, the existence of a new connection is proved. In particular cases, this connection reduces to several symmetric, semi-symmetric and quarter-symmetric connections; even some of them are not introduced so far. We also find formula for curvature tensor of this new connection.
We generalize the Gamma $z$ calculus to study degenerate drift-diffusion processes, where $z$ stands for extra directions introduced into the degenerate system. Based on this calculus, we establish the sub-Riemannian Ricci curvature tensor and the associated curvature dimension bound for general sub-Riemannian manifolds. These results do not require the commutative iteration of Gamma and Gamma z operator and go beyond the step two condition. These allow us to analyze the convergence properties of degenerate drift-diffusion processes and prove the entropy dissipation rate and several functional inequalities in sub-Riemannian manifolds. Several examples are provided. In particular, we show the global in time convergence result for displacement group with a weighted volume on a compact region. The new Gamma $z$ calculus is motivated by optimal transport and density manifold. We embed the probability density space over sub-Riemannian manifold with the $L^2$ sub-Riemannian Wasserstein metric. We call it sub-Riemannian density manifold (SDM). We study the dynamical behavior of the degenerate Fokker-Planck equation as gradient flows in SDM. Our derivation builds an equivalence relation between Gamma z calculus and second-order calculus in SDM.