arXiv subjects
Publications and source records attributed to Daniel Visscher.
We create examples of smooth, compact surfaces in $R^3$ for which the geodesic flow is Anosov. We determine their genus, thereby giving a (non-sharp) upper bound for the minimal genus of an embedded surface with Anosov geodesic flow. These examples are explicit physically realizable Anosov systems.
We give a new proof of the existence of compact surfaces embedded in $R^3$ with Anosov geodesic flows. This proof starts with a non-compact model surface whose geodesic flow is shown to be Anosov using a uniformly strictly invariant cone condition. Using a sequence of explicit maps based on the standard torus embedding, we produce compact embedded surfaces that can be seen as small perturbations of the Anosov model system and hence are themselves Anosov.
We prove that for the frame flow on a negatively curved, closed manifold of odd dimension other than 7, and a Holder continuous potential that is constant on fibers, there is a unique equilibrium measure. We prove a similar result for automorphisms of the Heisenberg manifold fibering over the torus. Our methods also give an alternate proof of Brin and Gromov's result on the ergodicity of these frame flows.
Given a Riemannian manifold $(M,g)$ and a geodesic $γ$, the perpendicular part of the derivative of the geodesic flow $ϕ_g^t: SM \rightarrow SM$ along $γ$ is a linear symplectic map. We give an elementary proof of the following Franks' lemma, originally found in [G. Contreras and G. Paternain, 2002] and [G. Contreras, 2010]: this map can be perturbed freely within a neighborhood in $Sp(n)$ by a $C^2$-small perturbation of the metric $g$ that keeps $γ$ a geodesic for the new metric. Moreover, the size of these perturbations is uniform over fixed length geodesics on the manifold. When $\dim M \geq 3$, the original metric must belong to a $C^2$--open and dense subset of metrics.