Geodesic fields for Pontryagin type C0-Finsler manifolds

Abstract

Let M be a differentiable manifold, TxM be its tangent space at x ∈ M and TM = {(x, y);x ∈ M;y ∈ TxM} be its tangent bundle. A C0-Finsler structure is a continuous function F : TM → [0, ∞) such that F(x, ⋅) : TxM → [0, ∞) is an asymmetric norm. In this work we introduce the Pontryagin type C0-Finsler structures, which are structures that satisfy the minimum requirements of Pontryagin’s maximum principle for the problem of minimizing paths. We define the extended geodesic field ℰ on the slit cotangent bundle T*M\0 of (M, F), which is a generalization of the geodesic spray of Finsler geometry. We study the case where ℰ is a locally Lipschitz vector field. We show some examples where the geodesics are more naturally represented by ℰ than by a similar structure on TM. Finally we show that the maximum of independent Finsler structures is a Pontryagin type C0-Finsler structure where ℰ is a locally Lipschitz vector field.