Geodesic flow, left-handedness, and templates

Pierre Dehornoy

Published 2011-12-29, updated 2014-12-05Version 3

We establish that, for every hyperbolic orbifold of type (2, q, $\infty$) and for every orbifold of type (2, 3, 4g+2), the geodesic flow on the unit tangent bundle is left-handed. This implies that the link formed by every collection of periodic orbits (i) bounds a Birkhoff section for the geodesic flow, and (ii) is a fibered link. We also prove similar results for the torus with any flat metric. Besides, we observe that the natural extension of the conjecture to arbitrary hyperbolic surfaces (with non-trivial homology) is false.