Homotopy groups and periodic geodesics of closed 4-manifolds

Abstract

Given a simply connected, closed four manifold, we associate to it a simply connected, closed, spin five manifold. This leads to several consequences : the stable and unstable homotopy groups of such a four manifold is determined by its second Betti number, and the ranks of the homotopy groups can be explicitly calculated. We show that for a generic metric on such a smooth four manifold with second Betti number at least three, the number of geometrically distinct periodic geodesics of length at most l grow exponentially as a function of l. The number of closed Reeb orbits of length at most l on the spherization of the cotangent bundle also grow exponentially for any Reeb flow.