Distance Geometry and a Hydrodynamical Hopf-Rinow Criterion

Abstract

The hydrodynamical Hopf-Rinow problem asks whether a given reconfiguration of an ideal fluid can be attained by an Euler flow. On the flat two-dimensional torus, we give an equivalent criterion for the strong version of this problem (which requires that the fluid motion minimizes the total kinetic energy required) in terms of metric betweenness. Toward this, we prove that sufficiently small normal neighborhoods in the volume-preserving diffeomorphism group of the flat $n$-dimensional torus, $n \geq 2$, equipped with the kinetic energy metric, are geodesically convex; resolving the strong problem locally in the $H^s$ topology. We further establish local bi-Lipschitz equivalence of the intrinsic geodesic distance and the extrinsic $L^2$ distance. Finally, we prove that the squared geodesic distance from the identity admits a $C^{1,1}$ extension from a sufficiently small normal neighborhood to the ambient $L^2$ space.