Closed 1/2-Elasticae in the 2-Sphere

Abstract

We study critical trajectories in the sphere for the $1/2$-Bernoulli's bending functional with length constraint. For every Lagrange multiplier encoding the conservation of the length during the variation, we show the existence of infinitely many closed trajectories which depend on a pair of relatively prime natural numbers. A geometric description of these numbers and the relation with the shape of the corresponding critical trajectories is also given.

To appear in Journal of Nonlinear Science