On Geodesic Flow and Energy Functional on Riemannian Manifolds

Abstract

In this paper, we study the geodesic flow and the energy functional on a Riemannian manifold and show that the geodesics have minimal energy, in other words, are the minimizers of the energy functional, from the new perspective of involution, and that the geodesic flow is a Hamiltonian flow which has a close connection with the canonical symplectic structure on the tangent bundle of a Riemannian manifold.