Locally Extremal Timelike Geodesic Loops on Lorentzian Manifolds

2022/01/24 by Ivan P. Costa e Silva, Silva, Ivan P. Costa e, José Luis Flores +3 · 1 citation
Mathematics · Physics and Astronomy · #Advanced Differential Geometry Research #Differential Geometry (math.DG) #FOS: Mathematics #Geometric Analysis and Curvature Flows #History and Theory of Mathematics

paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2201.09993

openalex publication_date 2022/01/24 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28

Abstract

Conditions for the existence of closed geodesics is a classic, much-studied subject in Riemannian geometry, with many beautiful results and powerful techniques. However, many of the techniques that work so well in that context are far less effective in Lorentzian geometry. In revisiting this problem here, we introduce the notion of timelike geodesic homotopy, a restriction to geodesics of the more standard timelike homotopy (also known as t-homotopy) of timelike loops on Lorentzian manifolds. This tool is combined with a local shortening/stretching of length argument to provide a number of new results on the existence of closed timelike geodesics on compact Lorentz manifolds.

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