English

Geodesic and conformally Reeb vector fields on flat 3-manifolds

Symplectic Geometry 2023-07-26 v3 Differential Geometry

Abstract

A unit vector field on a Riemannian manifold MM is called geodesic if all of its integral curves are geodesics. We show, in the case of MM being a flat 3-manifold not equal to E3\mathbb{E}^3, that every such vector field is tangent to a 2-dimensional totally geodesic foliation. Furthermore, it is shown that a geodesic vector field XX on a closed flat 3-manifold is (up to rescaling) the Reeb vector field of a contact form if and only if there is a contact structure transverse to XX that is given as the orthogonal complement of some other geodesic vector field. An explicit description of the lifted contact structures (up to diffeomorphism) on the 3-torus is given in terms of the volume of XX. Finally, similar results for non-closed flat 3-manifolds are discussed.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2207.03274,
  title  = {Geodesic and conformally Reeb vector fields on flat 3-manifolds},
  author = {Tilman Becker},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2207.03274},
  year   = {2023}
}

Comments

19 pages, 6 figures V2: Minor corrections, added remark following Theorem 1. V3: Corrected a mistake in the statement of Proposition 7

R2 v1 2026-06-24T12:17:12.413Z