Kähler structures on spaces of framed curves

Abstract

We consider the space $${\mathcal {M}}$$ of Euclidean similarity classes of framed loops in $${\mathbb {R}}^3$$ . Framed loop space is shown to be an infinite-dimensional Kahler manifold by identifying it with a complex Grassmannian. We show that the space of isometrically immersed loops studied by Millson and Zombro is realized as the symplectic reduction of $${\mathcal {M}}$$ by the action of the based loop group of the circle, giving a smooth version of a result of Hausmann and Knutson on polygon space. The identification with a Grassmannian allows us to describe the geodesics of $$\mathcal {M}$$ explicitly. Using this description, we show that $${\mathcal {M}}$$ and its quotient by the reparameterization group are nonnegatively curved. We also show that the planar loop space studied by Younes, Michor, Shah and Mumford in the context of computer vision embeds in $${\mathcal {M}}$$ as a totally geodesic, Lagrangian submanifold. The action of the reparameterization group on $${\mathcal {M}}$$ is shown to be Hamiltonian, and this is used to characterize the critical points of the weighted total twist functional.