On the Existence of Focal Points near Closed Geodesics on Surfaces

We establish some criteria for the existence or nonexistence of focal points near closed geodesics on surfaces. These criteria are in terms of the curvature of the manifold along the closed geodesic and the average values of the partial derivatives of the curvature in the direction perpendicular to the geodesic. Our criteria lead to a new family of examples of surfaces with no focal points. We also show that if S is a compact surface with no focal points and an inequality relating the curvature of the surface to the curvature of the horocycles holds, then the horocycles (considered as curves in S) are uniformly C ^2+Lipschitz.