2017/01/11 by Tom Needham, Needham, Tom
Mathematics · #Differential Geometry (math.DG) #FOS: Mathematics #Morphological variations and asymmetry
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1701.03183
openalex publication_date 2017/01/11 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
We consider the space M of Euclidean similarity classes of framed loops in ℝ3. Framed loop space is shown to be an infinite-dimensional Kähler manifold by identifying it with a complex Grassmannian. We show that the space of isometrically immersed loops studied by Millson and Zombro is realized as the symplectic reduction of M by the action of the based loop group of the circle, giving a smooth version of a result of Hausmann and Knutson on polygon space. The identification with a Grassmannian allows us to describe the geodesics of M explicitly. Using this description, we show that M and its quotient by the reparameterization group are nonnegatively curved. We also show that the planar loop space studied by Younes, Michor, Shah and Mumford in the context of computer vision embeds in M as a totally geodesic, Lagrangian submanifold. The action of the reparameterization group on M is shown to be Hamiltonian and this is used to characterize the critical points of the weighted total twist functional.