In this article, we study the microlocal properties of the geodesic ray transform of symmetric $m$-tensor fields on 2-dimensional Riemannian manifolds with boundary allowing the possibility of conjugate points. As is known from an earlier work on the geodesic ray transform of functions in the presence of conjugate points, the normal operator can be decomposed into a sum of a pseudodifferential operator ($Ψ$DO) and a finite number of Fourier integral operators (FIOs) under the assumption of no singular conjugate pairs along geodesics, which always holds in 2-dimensions. In this work, we use the method of stationary phase to explicitly compute the principal symbol of the $Ψ$DO and each of the FIO components of the normal operator acting on symmetric $m$-tensor fields. Next, we construct a parametrix recovering the solenoidal component of the tensor fields modulo FIOs, and prove a cancellation of singularities result, similar to an earlier result of Monard, Stefanov and Uhlmann for the case of geodesic ray transform of functions in 2-dimensions. We point out that this type of cancellation result is only possible in the 2-dimensional case.
We prove an estimate on the difference of Maslov indices relative to the choice of two distinct reference Lagrangians of a continuous path in the Lagrangian Grassmannian of a symplectic space. We discuss some applications to the study of conjugate and focal points along a geodesic in a semi-Riemannian manifold.
Let $\left( M,J,g\right) $ be a metallic pseudo-Riemannian manifold equipped with a metallic structure $J$ and a pseudo-Riemannian metric $g$. The paper deals with interactions of Codazzi couplings formed by conjugate connections and tensor structures. The presence of Tachibana operator and Codazzi couplings presented a new characterization for locally metallic pseudo-Riemannian manifold. Also, a necessary and sufficient condition a non-integrable metallic pseudo-Riemannian manifold is a quasi metallic pseudo Riemannian manifold is derived. Finally, it is introduced metallic-like pseudo-Rieman…
We study the singularities of the exponential map in semi Riemannian locally symmetric manifolds. Conjugate points along geodesics depend only on real negative eigenvalues of the curvature tensor, and their contribution to the Maslov index of the geodesic is computed explicitly. We prove that degeneracy of conjugate points, which is a phenomenon that can only occur in semi-Riemannian geometry, is caused in the locally symmetric case by the lack of diagonalizability of the curvature tensor. The case of Lie groups endowed with a bi-invariant metric is studied in some detail, and conditions are g…
Helfer in [Pacific J. Math. 164/2 (1994), p. 321--350] was the first to produce an example of a spacelike Lorentzian geodesic with a continuum of conjugate points. In this paper we show the following result: given an interval $[a,b]$ of $IR$ and any closed subset $F$ of $IR$ contained in $]a,b]$, then there exists a Lorentzian manifold $(M,g)$ and a spacelike geodesic $γ:[a,b]\to M$ such that $γ(t)$ is conjugate to $γ(a)$ along $γ$ iff $t\in F$.
What are appropriate geometric conditions ensuring that a complete Riemannian 2-cylinder without conjugate points is flat? Examples with nonpositive curvature show that one has to assume that the ends of the cylinder open sublinearly. We show that sublinear growth of the ends is indeed sufficient if it is measured by the length of horocycles. This is used to extend results by K. Burns and G. Knieper [9], and by H. Koehler [18], where the opening of the ends is measured in terms of shortest noncontractible loops.
This note proves that any locally extremal non-self-conjugate geodesic loop in a Riemannian manifold is a closed geodesic. As a consequence, any complete and non-contractible Riemannian manifold with diverging injectivity radii along diverging sequences and without points conjugate to themselves, possesses a minimizing closed geodesic.
A well-known Lemma in Riemannian geometry by Klingenberg says that if $x_0$ is a minimum point of the distance function $d(p,\cdot)$ to $p$ in the cut locus $C_p$ of $p$, then either there is a minimal geodesic from $p$ to $x_0$ along which they are conjugate, or there is a geodesic loop at $p$ that smoothly goes through $x_0$. In this paper, we prove that: for any point $q$ and any local minimum point $x_0$ of $F_q(\cdot)=d(p,\cdot)+d(q,\cdot)$ in $C_p$, either $x_0$ is conjugate to $p$ along each minimal geodesic connecting them, or there is a geodesic from $p$ to $q$ passing through $x_0$. …
In this paper, we extend and complete the classification of the generic singularities of the 3D-contact sub-Riemmanian conjugate locus in a neighbourhood of the origin.
We study the geodesic X-ray transform $X$ on compact Riemannian surfaces with conjugate points. Regardless of the type of the conjugate points, we show that we cannot recover the singularities and therefore, this transform is always unstable (ill-posed). We describe the microlocal kernel of $X$ and relate it to the conjugate locus. We present numerical examples illustrating the cancellation of singularities. We also show that the attenuated X-ray transform is well posed if the attenuation is positive and there are no more than two conjugate points along each geodesic; but still ill-posed, if t…
We prove sectional and Ricci-type comparison theorems for the existence of conjugate points along sub-Riemannian geodesics. In order to do that, we regard sub-Riemannian structures as a special kind of variational problems. In this setting, we identify a class of models, namely linear quadratic optimal control systems, that play the role of the constant curvature spaces. As an application, we prove a version of sub-Riemannian Bonnet-Myers theorem and we obtain some new results on conjugate points for three dimensional left-invariant sub-Riemannian structures.
The Cartan group is the free nilpotent Lie group of rank 2 and step 3. We consider the left-invariant sub-Riemannian problem on the Cartan group defined by an inner product in the first layer of its Lie algebra. This problem gives a nilpotent approximation of an arbitrary sub-Riemannian problem with the growth vector $(2,3,5)$. In previous works we described a group of symmetries of the sub-Riemannian problem on the Cartan group, and the corresponding Maxwell time -- the first time when symmetric geodesics intersect one another. It is known that geodesics are not globally optimal after the Max…
We revisit an example of a semi-Riemannian geodesic that was discussed by Musso, Pejsachowicz and Portaluri in 2007 to show that not every conjugate point is a bifurcation point. We point out a mistake in their argument, showing that on this geodesic actually every conjugate point is a bifurcation point. Finally, we provide an improved example which yields that the claim in our title is nevertheless true.
We bound the dimension of the fiber of a Riemannian submersion from a positively curved manifold in terms of the dimension of the base of the submersion and either its conjugate radius or the length of its shortest closed geodesic.
The authors find geodesics, shortest arcs, diameter, cut locus, and conjugate sets for left-invariant sub-Riemannian metric on the Lie group SO(3), under condition that the metric is right-invariant relative to the Lie subgroup $SO(2)\subset SO(3)$.
The authors found geodesics, shortest arcs, cut loci, and conjugate sets for left-invariant sub-Riemannian matric on the Lie group $SL(2)$, which is right-invariant relative to the Lie subgroup $SO(2)\subset SL(2)$ (in other words, for invariant sub-Riemannian metric on weakly symmetric space $(SL(2)\times SO(2))/SO(2)$).
Infinitely many new examples of compact Lorentzian surfaces without conjugate points are given. Further, we study the existence and the stability of this property among Lorentzian metrics with a Killing field. We obtain a new obstruction and prove that the Clifton- Pohl torus and some of our examples are as stable as possible. This shows that in constrast with the Riemannian Hopf theorem, the absence of conjugate points in the Lorentzian setting is neither "special" nor rigid.
The author finds geodesics, shortest arcs, cut locus, and conjugate sets for left-invariant sub-Riemannian metric on the Lie group $SO_0(2,1)$ under the condition that the metric is right-invariant relative to the Lie subgroup $SO(2)\subset SO_0(2,1)$.
We consider the nilpotent left-invariant sub-Riemannian structure on the Engel group. This structure gives a fundamental local approximation of a generic rank 2 sub-Riemannian structure on a 4-manifold near a generic point (in particular, of the kinematic models of a car with a trailer). On the other hand, this is the simplest sub-Riemannian structure of step three. We describe the global structure of the cut locus (the set of points where geodesics lose their global optimality), the Maxwell set (the set of points that admit more than one minimizer), and the intersection of the cut locus with …
We study the geodesic X-ray transform $I_Γ$ of tensor fields on a compact Riemannian manifold $M$ with non-necessarily convex boundary and with possible conjugate points. We assume that $I_Γ$ is known for geodesics belonging to an open set $Γ$ with endpoint on the boundary. We prove generic s-injectivity and a stability estimate under some topological assumptions and under the condition that for any $(x,ξ)\in T^*M$, there is a geodesic without conjugate points in $Γ$ through $x$ normal to $ξ$.
A conjecture of Burns and Knieper asks whether a 2-plane with a metric without conjugate points, and with a geodesic foliation whose lines are at bounded Hausdorff distance, is necessarily flat. We prove this conjecture in two cases: under the hypothesis that the plane admits total curvature, and under the hypothesis of visibility at some point. Along the way, we show that all geodesic line foliations on a Riemannian 2-plane must be homeomorphic to the standard one.
In this paper we survey on some recent results on Riemannian orbifolds and singular Riemannian foliations and combine them to conclude the existence of closed geodesics in the leaf space of some classes of singular Riemannian foliations (s.r.f.), namely s.r.f. that admit sections or have no horizontal conjugate points. We also investigate the shortening process with respect to Riemannian foliations.
We study the sub-Riemannian exponential for contact distributions on manifolds of dimension greater or equal to 5. We compute an approximation of the sub-Riemannian Hamiltonian flow and show that the conjugate time can have multiplicity 2 in this case. We obtain an approximation of the first conjugate locus for small radii and introduce a geometric invariant to show that the metric for contact distributions typically exhibits an original behavior, different from the classical 3-dimensional case. We apply these methods to the case of 5-dimensional contact manifolds. We provide a stability analy…
The existence of a conjugate point on the volume-preserving diffeomorphism group of a compact Riemannian manifold M is related to the Lagrangian stability of a solution of the incompressible Euler equation on M. The Misiolek curvature is a reasonable criterion for the existence of a conjugate point on the volume-preserving diffeomorphism group corresponding to a stationary solution of the incompressible Euler equation. In this article, we introduce a class of stationary solutions on an arbitrary Riemannian manifold whose behavior is nice with respect to the Misiolek curvature and give a positi…
Consider a compact Riemannian manifold with boundary endowed with a magnetic field. A path taken by a particle of unit charge, mass, and energy is called a magnetic geodesic. It is shown that if everything is real-analytic, the topology, metric, and magnetic field are uniquely determined by the scattering relation of the magnetic geodesic flow, measured at the boundary. Conjugate points are allowed with minor restrictions. In exchange for the real-analytic assumption, prior results in boundary rigidity are greatly generalized.
Two Riemannian manifolds are said to have $C^k$-conjugate geodesic flows if there exist an $C^k$ diffeomorphism between their unit tangent bundles which intertwines the geodesic flows. We obtain a number of rigidity results for the geodesic flows on compact 2-step Riemannian nilmanifolds: For generic 2-step nilmanifolds the geodesic flow is $C^2$ rigid. For special classes of 2-step nilmanifolds, we show that the geodesic flow is $C^0$ or $C^2$ rigid. In particular, there exist continuous families of 2-step nilmanifolds whose Laplacians are isospectral but whose geodesic flows are not $C^0$ co…
In this note we formulate a condition for complete, connected and non-compact Riemannian manifolds which implies no conjugate points in case that the geodesic flow is Anosov with respect to the Sasaki metric.
This article deals with 2d almost Riemannian structures, which are generalized Riemannian structures on manifolds of dimension 2. Such sub-Riemannian structures can be locally defined by a pair of vector fields (X,Y), playing the role of orthonormal frame, that may become colinear on some subset. We denote D = span(X,Y). After a short introduction, I first give a description of the local cut and conjugate loci at a Grushin point q (where Dq has dimension 1 and Dq = TqM) that makes appear that the cut locus may have an angle at q. In a second time I describe the local cut and conjugate loci at …
We prove that Riemannian metrics with an absolute Ricci curvature bound and a conjugate radius bound can be smoothed to having a sectional curvature bound. Using this we derive a number of results about structures of manifolds with Ricci curvature bounds.
The scattering data of a Riemannian manifold with boundary record the incoming and outgoing directions of each geodesic passing through. We show that the scattering data of a generic Riemannian surface with no trapped geodesics and no conjugate points determine the lengths of geodesics. Counterexamples exists when trapped geodesics are allowed.
For a singular Riemannian foliation whose leaves are properly embedded, we show in the first part of this article the existence of global tubular neighbourhoods, and we develop a global description of the foliation as stratification by types of leaves. The second part deals with the further restriction to a foliation without horizontal conjugate points, introduced by Lytchak and Thorbergsson, which in the special case of an isometric group action equals the concept of variationally completeness. Therefrom, we deduce a global geometric description -- the focal points of the leaves are exactly t…
Each compact Riemannian manifold with no conjugate points admits a family of functions whose integrals vanish exactly when central Busemann functions split linearly. These functions vanish when all central Busemann functions are sub- or superharmonic. When central Busemann functions are convex or concave, they must be totally geodesic. These yield generalizations of the splitting theorems of O'Sullivan and Eberlein for manifolds with no focal points and, respectively, nonpositive curvature.
The ratio of convexity radius over injectivity radius may be made arbitrarily small within the class of compact Riemannian manifolds of any fixed dimension at least two. This is proved using Gulliver's method of constructing manifolds with focal points but no conjugate points. The approach is suggested by a characterization of the convexity radius that resembles a classical result of Klingenberg about the injectivity radius.
Geodesics and shortest arcs of some sub-Riemannian metrics on the Lie groups $SU(2)\times\mathbb{R}$ and $SO(3)\times\mathbb{R}$ with three-dimensional generating distributions
In this short note, we prove that the usual $Θ$ function on a Riemannian manifold without conjugate points is uniformly bounded from below. This extends a result of Green in two dimensions. This elementary lemma implies that the Bérard remainder in the Weyl law is valid for a manifold without conjugate points, without any restriction on the dimension.
Perturbed geodesics are trajectories of particles moving on a semi-Riemannian manifold in the presence of a potential. Our purpose here is to extend to perturbed geodesics on semi-Riemannian manifolds the well known Morse Index Theorem. When the metric is indefinite, the Morse index of the energy functional becomes infinite and hence, in order to obtain a meaningful statement, we substitute the Morse index by its relative form, given by the spectral flow of an associated family of index forms. We also introduce a new counting for conjugate points, which need not to be isolated in this context,…
Using symplectic techniques and spectral analysis of smooth paths of self-adjoint operators, we characterize the set of conjugate instants along a geodesic in an infinite dimensional Riemannian Hilbert manifold.
We consider the Lie group PSL(2) (the group of orientation preserving isometries of the hyperbolic plane) and a left-invariant Riemannian metric on this group with two equal eigenvalues that correspond to space-like eigenvectors (with respect to the Killing form). For such metrics we find a parametrization of geodesics, the conjugate time, the cut time and the cut locus. The injectivity radius is computed. We show that the cut time and the cut locus in such Riemannian problem converge to the cut time and the cut locus in the corresponding sub-Riemannian problem as the third eigenvalue of the m…
We study the microlocal properties of the geodesic X-ray transform $\mathcal{X}$ on a manifold with boundary allowing the presence of conjugate points. Assuming that there are no self-intersecting geodesics and all conjugate pairs are nonsingular we show that the normal operator $\mathcal{N} = \mathcal{X}^t \circ \mathcal{X}$ can be decomposed as the sum of a pseudodifferential operator of order $-1$ and a sum of Fourier integral operators. We also apply this decomposition to prove inversion of $\mathcal{X}$ is only mildly ill-posed in dimension three or higher.
In this paper, we prove the concavity of the Shannon entropy power for the heat equation associated with the Laplacian or the Witten Laplacian on complete Riemannian manifolds with suitable curvature-dimension condition and on compact super Ricci flows. Under suitable curvature-dimension condition, we prove that the rigidity models of the Shannon entropy power are Einstein or quasi Einstein manifolds with Hessian solitons. Moreover, we prove the convexity of the Shannon entropy power for the conjugate heat equation introduced by G. Perelman on Ricci flow and that the corresponding rigidity mod…
Let $σ$ be the scattering relation on a compact Riemannian manifold $M$ with non-necessarily convex boundary, that maps initial points of geodesic rays on the boundary and initial directions to the outgoing point on the boundary and the outgoing direction. Let $\ell$ be the length of that geodesic ray. We study the question of whether the metric $g$ is uniquely determined, up to an isometry, by knowledge of $σ$ and $\ell$ restricted on some subset $D$. We allow possible conjugate points but we assume that the conormal bundle of the geodesics issued from $D$ covers $T^*M$; and that those geodes…
We provide the first known family of examples of integrable homogeneous sub-Riemannian structures admitting strictly abnormal geodesics. These examples were obtained through the analysis of the equivalence problem for sub-Riemannian Engel structures. We formulate a criterion of strict abnormality in terms of structure functions of a canonical frame on a sub-Riemannian Engel manifold as well as estimates on conjugate times.
Geodesics and shortest arcs of some sub-Riemannian metrics on the Lie groups $SU(1,1)\times\mathbb{R}$ and $SO_0(2,1)\times\mathbb{R}$ with three-dimensional generating distributions
It is well known since Jacobi that the geodesic flow of the ellipsoid is "completely integrable", which means that the geodesic orbits are described in a certain explicit way. However, it does not directly indicate that any global behavior of the geodesics becomes easy to see. In fact, it happened quite recently that a proof for the statement "The conjugate locus of a general point in two-dimensional ellipsoid has just four cusps" in Jacobi's Vorlesungen über dynamik appeared in the literature. In this paper, we consider Liouville manifolds, a certain class of Riemannian manifolds which contai…
For a sub-Riemannian manifold provided with a smooth volume, we relate the small time asymptotics of the heat kernel at a point $y$ of the cut locus from $x$ with roughly "how much" $y$ is conjugate to $x$. This is done under the hypothesis that all minimizers connecting $x$ to $y$ are strongly normal, i.e.\ all pieces of the trajectory are not abnormal. Our result is a refinement of the one of Leandre $4t\log p_t(x,y)\to -d^2(x,y)$ for $t\to 0$, in which only the leading exponential term is detected. Our results are obtained by extending an idea of Molchanov from the Riemannian to the sub-Rie…
We characterize the kernel of the mixed ray transform on simple $2$-dimensional Riemannian manifolds, that is, on simple surfaces for tensors of any order.
We investigate the effect of the average scalar curvature on the conjugate radius, average area of the geodesic spheres, average volume of the metric balls and the total volume of a closed Riemannian manifold $N$ (or more generally $N$ with finite volume whose negative Ricci curvature integral on $SN$ is finite). For example, we prove that if the average scalar curvature is larger than the lower bound of the normalized Ricci curvature, then we can improve the Bishop-Gromov estimate on the average volume of the metric balls of any size. We also prove the monotone decreasing property of a certai…
We derive Price inequalities for harmonic forms on manifolds without conjugate points and with a negative Ricci upper bound. The techniques employed in the proof work particularly well for manifolds of non-positive sectional curvature, and in this case we prove a strengthened Price inequality. We employ these inequalities to study the asymptotic behavior of the Betti numbers of coverings of Riemannian manifolds without conjugate points. Finally, we give a vanishing result for $L^{2}$-Betti numbers of closed manifolds without conjugate points.
Let (M,g) be a complete, simply connected Riemannian manifold of dimension 3 without conjugate points. We show that M is a hyperbolic manifold of constant sectional curvature, provided M is asymptotically harmonic of constant h > 0.
