Growth of the number of geodesics between points and insecurity for Riemannian manifolds

Eugene Gutkin | Burns, Keith

Keywords: riemannian manifold | security | geodesics | entropy

A Riemannian manifold is said to be uniformly secure if there is a finite number $s$ such that all geodesics connecting an arbitrary pair of points in the manifold can be blocked by $s$ point obstacles. We prove that the number of geodesics with length $\leq T$ between every pair of points in a uniformly secure manifold grows polynomially as $T \to \infty$. We derive from this that a compact Riemannian manifold with no conjugate points whose geodesic flow has positive topological entropy is totally insecure: the geodesics between any pair of points cannot be blocked by a finite number of point obstacles.

Anexos:

• bg15.pdf