Closed geodesics on orbifolds

Abstract: The study of closed geodesics on Riemannian manifolds is a very old and renowned field of Riemannian geometry and in particular the question of the existence of at least one closed geodesics on a compact Riemannian manifold has been answered positively by Lyusternik and Fet with a proof in 1951. The same question for Riemannian orbifolds however, initially studied by Guruprasad and Haefliger in 2006, turns out to be surprisingly difficult and up to this day remains open, despite the fact that orbifolds are just a mild generalization of manifolds and often exhibit similar properties. In the talk I reproof and slightly improve the results by Guruprasad and Haefliger using an alternative approach. This is a joint project with Luca Asselle.