From curve shortening to flat link stability and Birkhoff sections of geodesic flows

Abstract

We employ the curve shortening flow to establish three new results on the dynamics of geodesic flows of closed Riemannian surfaces. The first one is the stability, under $C^0$-small perturbations of the Riemannian metric, of certain flat links of closed geodesics. The second one is a forced existence theorem for closed connected orientable Riemannian surfaces: for surfaces of positive genus, the existence of a contractible simple closed geodesic $\gamma$ forces the existence of infinitely many closed geodesics intersecting $\gamma$ in every primitive free homotopy class of loops; for the 2-sphere, the existence of two disjoint simple closed geodesics forces the existence of a third one intersecting both. The final result asserts the existence of Birkhoff sections for the geodesic flow of any closed connected orientable Riemannian surface.