Closed geodesics on orbifolds of nonpositive or nonnegative curvature

Abstract

In this note we prove existence of closed geodesics of positive length on compact developable orbifolds of nonpositive or nonnegative curvature. We also include a geometric proof of existence of closed geodesics whenever the orbifold fundamental group contains a hyperbolic element and therefore reduce the existence problem to developable orbifolds with \(\pi _1^{orb}\) infinite and having finite exponent and finitely many conjugacy classes.