Surfaces of section for geodesic flows of closed surfaces

Abstract We prove several results concerning the existence of surfaces of section for the geodesic flows of closed orientable Riemannian surfaces. The surfaces of section $\Sigma $ that we construct are either Birkhoff sections, which means that they intersect every sufficiently long orbit segment of the geodesic flow, or at least they have some hyperbolic components in $\partial \Sigma $ as limit sets of the orbits of the geodesic flow that do not return to $\Sigma $ . In order to prove these theorems, we provide a study of configurations of simple closed geodesics of closed orientable Riemannian surfaces, which may have independent interest. Our arguments are based on the curve shortening flow.