Improved Index and Intersection bounds for Min-Max Geodesics

Abstract

In this note, we show that the sum of the Morse index and number of intersections of min-max geodesics achieving the p-widths of a closed surface are bounded above by $p$, improving a result from our previous work. A key idea is that deformations coming from vertex desingularization and eigenfunctions of the Jacobi operator on geodesics are sufficiently independent.