Sharp upper bounds on the length of the shortest closed geodesic on complete punctured spheres of finite area

Antonia Jabbour, Stéphane Sabourau

Published 2020-09-21Version 1

We establish sharp universal upper bounds on the length of the shortest closed geodesic on a punctured sphere with three or four ends endowed with a complete Riemannian metric of finite area. These sharp curvature-free upper bounds are expressed in terms of the area of the punctured sphere. In both cases, we describe the extremal metrics, which are modeled on the Calabi-Croke sphere or the tetrahedral sphere. We also extend these optimal inequalities for reversible and non-necessarily reversible Finsler metrics. In this setting, we obtain optimal bounds for spheres with a larger number of punctures. Finally, we present a roughly asymptotically optimal upper bound on the length of the shortest closed geodesic for spheres/surfaces with a large number of punctures in terms of the area.