We prove several results concerning the existence of surfaces of section for the geodesic flows of closed orientable Riemannian surfaces. The surfaces of section $\Sigma $ that we construct are either Birkhoff sections, which means that they intersect every sufficiently long orbit segment of the geodesic flow, or at least they have some hyperbolic components in $\partial \Sigma $ as limit sets of the orbits of the geodesic flow that do not return to $\Sigma $. In order to prove these theorems, we provide a study of configurations of simple closed geodesics of closed orientable Riemannian surfaces, which may have independent interest. Our arguments are based on the curve shortening flow.

It is conjectured that the only integrable metrics on the two-dimensional torus are Liouville metrics. In this paper, we study a deformative version of this conjecture: we consider integrable deformations of a non-flat Liouville metric in a conformal class and show that for a fairly large class of such deformations, the deformed metric is again Liouville. The principal idea of the argument is that the preservation of rational invariant tori in the foliation of the phase space forces a linear combination on the Fourier coefficients of the deformation to vanish. Showing that the resulting linear system is non-degenerate will then yield the claim. Since our method of proof immediately carries over to higher dimensional tori, we obtain analogous statements in this more general case. To put our results in perspective, we review existing results about integrable metrics on the torus.

Let $\{\Lambda ^\infty _t\}$ be an isotopy of Legendrians (possibly singular) in a unit cosphere bundle $S^*M$ that arise as slices of a singular Legendrian $\Lambda _I^\infty \subset S^*M \times T^*I$. Let $\mathcal {C}_t = Sh(M, \Lambda ^\infty _t)$ be the differential graded derived category of constructible sheaves on $M$ with singular support at infinity contained in $\Lambda ^\infty _t$. We prove that if the isotopy of Legendrians embeds into an isotopy of Liouville hypersurfaces, then the family of categories $\{\mathcal {C}_t\}$ is constant in $t$.

We study the ergodic properties of horospheres on rank 1 manifolds with non-positive curvature. We prove that the horospheres are equidistributed under the action of the geodesic flow towards the Bowen–Margulis measure, on a large class of manifolds. In the case of surfaces, we define a parametrization of the horocyclic flow on the set of horocycles containing a rank 1 vector that is recurrent under the action of the geodesic flow. We prove that the horocyclic flow in restriction to this set is uniquely ergodic. The results are valid for large classes of manifolds, including the compact ones.

We prove that every non-degenerate Reeb flow on a closed contact manifold M admitting a strong symplectic filling W with vanishing first Chern class carries at least two geometrically distinct closed orbits provided that the positive equivariant symplectic homology of W satisfies a mild condition. Under further assumptions, we establish the existence of two geometrically distinct closed orbits on any contact finite quotient of M. Several examples of such contact manifolds are provided, like displaceable ones, unit cosphere bundles, prequantisation circle bundles, Brieskorn spheres and toric contact manifolds. We also show that this condition on the equivariant symplectic homology is preserved by boundary connected sums of Liouville domains. As a byproduct of one of our applications, we prove a sort of Lusternik–Fet theorem for Reeb flows on the unit cosphere bundle of not rationally aspherical manifolds satisfying suitable additional assumptions.

We generalize the higher rank rigidity theorem to a class of Finsler spaces, i.e. Berwald spaces. More precisely, we prove that a complete connected Berwald space of finite volume and bounded non-positive flag curvature with rank at least two whose universal cover is irreducible is a locally symmetric space or a locally Minkowski space.

The width of a Lagrangian is the largest capacity of a ball that can be symplectically embedded into the ambient manifold such that the ball intersects the Lagrangian exactly along the real part of the ball. Due to Dimitroglou Rizell, finite width is an obstruction to a Lagrangian admitting an exact Lagrangian cap in the sense of Eliashberg–Murphy. In this paper we introduce a new method for bounding the width of a Lagrangian $Q$ by considering the Lagrangian Floer cohomology of an auxiliary Lagrangian $L$ with respect to a Hamiltonian whose chords correspond to geodesic paths in $Q$. This is formalized as a wrapped version of the Floer–Hofer–Wysocki capacity and we establish an associated energy–capacity inequality with the help of a closed–open map. For any orientable Lagrangian $Q$ admitting a metric of non-positive sectional curvature in a Liouville manifold, we show the width of $Q$ is bounded above by four times its displacement energy.

Let H be the n-dimensional hyperbolic space of constant sectional curvature –1 and let G be the identity component of the isometry group of H. We find all the G-invariant pseudo-Riemannian metrics on the space of oriented geodesics of H (modulo orientation preserving reparametrizations). We characterize the null, time- and space-like curves, providing a relationship between the geometries of and H. Moreover, we show that is Kähler and find an orthogonal almost complex structure on .

We study the problem of existence of $\mathcal{F}$-structures (in the sense of Cheeger and Gromov, but not necessarily polarized) on compact complex surfaces. We give a complete classification of compact complex surfaces of Káhler type admitting $\mathcal{F}$-structures. In the non-Káhler case we give a complete classification modulo the gap in the classification of surfaces of class VII.

We then use these results to study the minimal entropy problem for compact complex surfaces: we prove that, modulo the gap in the classification of surfaces of class VII, all compact complex surfaces of Kodaira dimension less than or equal to 1 have minimal entropy zero and such a surface admits a smooth metric $g$ with zero topological entropy if and only if it is ${\mathbb C} P^2$, a ruled surface of genus 0 or 1, a Hopf surface, a complex torus, a Kodaira surface, a hyperelliptic surface or a Kodaira surface modulo a finite group. The key result we use to prove this is a new topological obstruction to the existence of metrics with vanishing topological entropy.

Finally we show that these results fit perfectly into Wall's study of geometric structures on compact complex surfaces. For instance, we show that the minimal entropy problem can be solved for a minimal compact Káhler surface $S$ of Kodaira dimension $- \infty$, 0 or 1 if and only if $S$ admits a geometric structure modelled on ${\mathbb C} P^2$, $S^2 \times S^2$, $S^2 \times {\mathbb E}^2$ or ${\mathbb E}^4$.