Minimal geodesics

Motivated by the close relation between Aubry-Mather theory and minimal geodesies on a 2-torus we study the existence and properties of minimal geodesics in compact Riemannian manifolds of dimension ≥3. We prove that there exist minimal geodesics with certain rotation vectors and that there are restrictions on the rotation vectors of arbitrary minimal geodesics. A detailed analysis of the minimal geodesics of the ‘Hedlund examples’ shows that – to a certain extent – our results are optimal.