Zoll manifolds with boundary

Abstract We introduce and study Zoll manifolds with boundary: compact Riemannian manifolds with smooth boundary such that every geodesic issuing orthogonally from the boundary returns orthogonally and is nowhere tangent to it. We first show that all such free boundary geodesics are embedded and have a common length, and that the boundary has at most two connected components. If there are two components, we prove that the manifold is a product of an interval with a closed manifold. When the boundary is connected, we show that the manifold is a tubular neighborhood of a closed embedded submanifold, the “soul”, and that the complement of the soul is diffeomorphic to a half-open cylinder over the boundary. We further prove that all free boundary geodesics are maximally degenerate critical points of the energy functional and have the same Morse index, which equals the multiplicity of the unique focal point occurring at the midpoint of each geodesic. The projection from the boundary to the soul is then either a nontrivial two-fold covering or a smooth sphere bundle, according to the value of this index. As applications, we obtain a complete classification of Zoll surfaces with boundary and of three-dimensional Zoll manifolds with boundary.