GEODESICS ON RIEMANNIAN STACKS

Metrics on Lie groupoids and differentiable stacks have been introduced recently, extending the Riemannian geometry of manifolds and orbifolds to more general singular spaces. Here we continue that theory, studying stacky curves on Riemannian stacks, measuring their length using stacky metrics, and introducing stacky geodesics. Our main results show that the length of stacky curves measure distances on the orbit space, characterize stacky geodesics as locally minimizing curves, and establish a stacky version of the Hopf-Rinow Theorem. We include a concise overview that bypasses nonessential technicalities, and we lay stress on the examples of orbit spaces of isometric actions and leaf spaces of Riemannian foliations.