Deformations of the Veronese embedding and Finsler 2-spheres of constant curvature

Abstract

We establish a one-to-one correspondence between Finsler structures on the $2$-sphere with constant curvature $1$ and all geodesics closed on the one hand, and Weyl connections on certain spindle orbifolds whose symmetric Ricci curvature is positive definite and all of whose geodesics are closed on the other hand. As an application of our duality result, we show that suitable holomorphic deformations of the Veronese embedding $\mathbb{CP}(a_1,a_2)\to \mathbb{CP}(a_1,(a_1+a_2)/2,a_2)$ of weighted projective spaces provide examples of Finsler $2$-spheres of constant curvature whose geodesics are all closed.

30 pages, exposition improved, references updated