Fat flats in rank one manifolds

We study closed non-positively curved Riemannian manifolds $M$ which admit `fat $k$-flats': that is, the universal cover $\tilde M$ contains a positive radius neighborhood of a $k$-flat on which the sectional curvatures are identically zero. We investigate how the fat $k$-flats affect the cardinality of the collection of closed geodesics. Our first main result is to construct rank $1$ non-positively curved manifolds with a fat $1$-flat which corresponds to a twisted cylindrical neighborhood of a geodesic on $M$. As a result, $M$ contains an embedded closed geodesic with a flat neighborhood, but $M$ nevertheless has only countably many closed geodesics. Such metrics can be constructed on finite covers of arbitrary odd-dimensional finite volume hyperbolic manifolds. Our second main result is to prove a closing theorem for fat flats, which implies that a manifold $M$ with a fat $k$-flat contains an immersed, totally geodesic $k$-dimensional flat closed submanifold. This guarantees the existence of uncountably many closed geodesics when $k \geq 2$. Finally, we collect results on thermodynamic formalism for the class of manifolds considered in this paper.