Locally Extremal Timelike Geodesic Loops on Lorentzian Manifolds

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new concept called timelike geodesic homotopy and uses it with length modification techniques to establish novel results on the existence of closed timelike geodesics in compact Lorentzian manifolds.

Contribution

It develops the notion of timelike geodesic homotopy and applies local length adjustments to prove new existence results for closed timelike geodesics in Lorentzian geometry.

Findings

Established conditions for the existence of closed timelike geodesics.

Introduced the concept of timelike geodesic homotopy.

Applied local length modifications to Lorentzian manifolds.

Abstract

Conditions for the existence of closed geodesics is a classic, much-studied subject in Riemannian geometry, with many beautiful results and powerful techniques. However, many of the techniques that work so well in that context are far less effective in Lorentzian geometry. In revisiting this problem here, we introduce the notion of timelike geodesic homotopy, a restriction to geodesics of the more standard timelike homotopy (also known as $t$-homotopy) of timelike loops on Lorentzian manifolds. This tool is combined with a local shortening/stretching of length argument to provide a number of new results on the existence of closed timelike geodesics on compact Lorentz manifolds.