Curves in the Lorentz-Minkowski plane: elasticae, catenaries and grim-reapers

Abstract This article is motivated by a problem posed by David A. Singer in 1999 and by the classical Euler elastic curves. We study spacelike and timelike curves in the Lorentz-Minkowski plane ????2 whose curvature is expressed in terms of the Lorentzian pseudodistance to fixed geodesics. In this way, we get a complete description of all the elastic curves in ????2 and provide the Lorentzian versions of catenaries and grim-reaper curves. We show several uniqueness results for them in terms of their geometric linear momentum. In addition, we are able to get arc-length parametrizations of all the aforementioned curves and they are depicted graphically.