Puncture loops on a non-orientable surface
Geometric Topology
2025-03-11 v1
Abstract
On a connected surface with negative Euler characteristic, the free homotopy class of a loop obtained by smoothing an intersection of two closed geodesics may wind around a puncture. Chas and Kabiraj showed that this phenomenon does not occur when the surface is orientable. In this paper, we prove that it occurs when is non-orientable and both geodesics involved in the smoothing are actually one-sided. In particular, we study a loop obtained by traversing a one-sided closed geodesic and the -th power of another one-sided closed geodesic for odd . Then we show that its free homotopy class may wind aroud a puncture at most two values of . Furthermore, if two such 's exist, they are consecutive odd integers.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2503.07247,
title = {Puncture loops on a non-orientable surface},
author = {Aoi Wakuda},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2503.07247},
year = {2025}
}
Comments
10 pages, 6 figures