The Existence of Infinitely Many Geometrically Distinct Non-Constant Prime Closed Geodesics on Riemannian Manifolds

Abstract

We enumerate a necessary condition for the existence of infinitely many geometrically distinct, non-constant, prime closed geodesics on an arbitrary closed Riemannian manifold $M$. That is, we show that any Riemannian metric on $M$ admits infinitely many prime closed geodesics such that the energy functional $E:\Lambda M\to\mathbb{R}$ has infinitely many non-degenerate critical points on the free loop space $\Lambda M$ of Sobolev class $H^1=W^{1,2}$. This result is obtained by invoking a handle decomposition of free loop space and using methods of cellular homology to study its topological invariants.