Applying Gromov's Amenable Localization to Geodesic Flows

TL;DR

This paper combines Gromov's amenable localization with Poincaré duality to analyze stratifications of geodesic flows on manifolds with boundary, providing lower bounds on strata counts and topological obstructions.

Contribution

It introduces a novel approach linking amenable localization and Poincaré duality to study geodesic flow stratifications and their topological properties.

Findings

Lower bounds for the number of flow-generated strata in terms of homology norms.

Homology spaces act as obstructions to certain convex metrics on manifolds.

Geodesic scattering map determines the stratified topology of geodesic spaces.

Abstract

Let $M$ be a compact smooth Riemannian $n$-manifold with boundary. We combine Gromov's amenable localization technique with the Poincar\'{e} duality to study the {\sf traversally generic} geodesic flows on $SM$, the space of the spherical tangent bundle. Such flows generate stratifications of $SM$, governed by rich universal combinatorics. The stratification reflects the ways in which the flow trajectories are tangent to the boundary $\partial(SM)$. Specifically, we get lower estimates of the numbers of connected components of these flow-generated strata of any given codimension $k$ in terms of the normed homology $H_k(M; \mathbf R)$ and $H_k(DM; \mathbf R)$, where $DM = M\cup_{\partial M} M$ denotes the double of $M$. The norms here are the {\sf simplicial semi-norms} in homology. The more complex the metric on $M$ is, the more numerous the strata of $SM$ and $S(DM)$ are. %So one may regard our estimates as analogues of the Morse inequalities for the geodesics on manifolds with boundary. It turns out that the normed homology spaces form obstructions to the existence of globally $k$-{\sf convex} traversally generic metrics on $M$. We also prove that knowing the geodesic scattering map on $M$ makes it possible to reconstruct the stratified topological type of the space of geodesics, as well as the amenably localized Poincar\'{e} duality operators on $SM$.