On the cut locus in Alexandrov spaces and applications to convex surfaces

Abstract

Alexandrov spaces are a large class of metric spaces that includes Hilbert spaces, Riemannian manifolds and convex surfaces. In the framework of Alexandrov spaces, we examine the ambiguous locus of analysis and the cut locus of di.erential geometry, proving a general bisecting property, showing how small the ambiguous locus must be, and proving that typically the ambiguous locus and a fortiori the cut locus are dense.