No Arabic abstract
We study the existence of closed geodesics on compact Riemannian orbifolds, and on noncompact Riemannian manifolds in the presence of a cocompact, isometric group action. We show that every noncontractible Riemannian manifold which admits such an action, and every odd-dimensional, compact Riemannian orbifold has a nontrivial closed geodesic.
We show that on every compact Riemannian 2-orbifold there exist infinitely many closed geodesics of positive length.
We study the asymptotics of the number N(t) of geometrically distinct closed geodesics of a Riemannian or Finsler metric on a connected sum of two compact manifolds of dimension at least three with non-trivial fundamental groups and apply this result to the prime decomposition of a three-manifold. In particular we show that the function N(t) grows at least like the prime numbers on a compact 3-manifold with infinite fundamental group. It follows that a generic Riemannian metric on a compact 3-manifold has infinitely many geometrically distinct closed geodesics. We also consider the case of a connected sum of a compact manifold with positive first Betti number and a simply-connected manifold which is not homeomorphic to a sphere.
We show that the geodesic period spectrum of a Riemannian 2-orbifold all of whose geodesics are closed depends, up to a constant, only on its orbifold topology and compute it. In the manifold case we recover the fact proved by Gromoll, Grove and Pries that all prime geodesics have the same length. In the appendix we partly strengthen our result in terms of conjugacy of contact forms and explain how to deduce rigidity on the real projective plane based on a systolic inequality due to Pu. (We do not use a Lusternik-Schnirelmann type theorem on the existence of at least three simple closed geodesics.)
We show that, on a complete and possibly non-compact Riemannian manifold of dimension at least 2 without close conjugate points at infinity, the existence of a closed geodesic with local homology in maximal degree and maximal index growth under iteration forces the existence of infinitely many closed geodesics. For closed manifolds, this was a theorem due to Hingston.
Manifolds all of whose geodesics are closed have been studied a lot, but there are only few examples known. The situation is different if one allows in addition for orbifold singularities. We show, nevertheless, that the abundance of new examples is restricted to even dimensions. As one key ingredient we provide a characterization of orientable manifolds among orientable orbifolds in terms of characteristic classes.