Chord shortening flow and a theorem of Lusternik and Schnirelmann

Abstract

We introduce a new geometric flow called the chord shortening flow which is the negative gradient flow for the length functional on the space of chords with end points lying on a fixed submanifold in Euclidean space. As an application, we give a simplified proof of a classical theorem of Lusternik and Schnirelmann (and a generalization by Riede and Hayashi) on the existence of multiple orthogonal geodesic chords. For a compact convex planar domain, we show that any convex chord which is not orthogonal to the boundary would shrink to a point in finite time under the flow.