Existence of Good Sweepouts on Closed Manifolds

Abstract

In this note we establish estimates for the harmonic map heat flow from $S^1$ into a closed manifold, and use it to construct sweepouts with the following good property: each curve in the tightened sweepout, whose energy is close to the maximal energy of curves in the sweepout, is itself close to a closed geodesic.

7 pages; added reference; corrected typos