I want to construct two quadrilaterals on the unit sphere with same interior angles $\alpha_1,…,\alpha_4$ and the same perimeter, but which are not congruent to each other. Is that possible? How can one construct a counterexample or how can one proof that this is impossible, respectively?
For triangles this is impossible. But I have no idea how to examine this situation for quadri
Best regards
Here are a pair of non-congruent spherical quadrilaterals having the same angles. $$ \begin{array}{c|c} Q_1 & Q_2 \\ (\theta = 85.7867979^\circ, \phi = -149.7665879^\circ) & (\theta = 85.4337583^\circ, \phi = -131.4321518^\circ) \\ (\theta = 87.0198508^\circ, \phi = -45.3478986^\circ) & (\theta = 86.5371734^\circ, \phi = -81.18809126^\circ) \\ (\theta = 85.7867979^\circ, \phi = +30.23341212^\circ) & (\theta = 85.4337583^\circ, \phi = 48.56784815^\circ) \\ (\theta = 87.0198508^\circ, \phi = +134.6521011^\circ) & (\theta = 86.5371734^\circ, \phi = +98.81190874^\circ) \\ \mbox{Q1 Angles} & \mbox{Q2 Angles} \\ 70.06877926 & 70.06877926 \\ 110.1435593 & 110.1435593 \\ 70.06877926 & 70.06877926 \\ 110.1435593 & 110.1435593 \\ \mbox{Q1 Sides (radians)} &\mbox{ Q2 Sides (radians)} \\ 0.10005 & 0.06196 \\ 0.07875 & 0.12712 \\ 0.10005 & 0.06196 \\ 0.07875 & 0.12712 \end{array} $$
The way I got this, was to start with a rhombus cetered on the origin of a plane, with side 1 in the X direction and a 70 degree angle at the lower left; this implies a height of .9397. The rhombus has maximal area to perimeter-squared ratio for all 70-degree parallelograms. Now I form parallelograms P1 by reducing the height by 0.2, and P2 by starting from an increased height by 0.2, and then adjusting the height such that P1 and P2 have the same $A/P^2$ ratio; the height of P2 comes out to 1.19376.
Now I parallel project both of these onto a sphere of radius 10, which gives two quadrilaterals with slightly different angular excess (and hence forced to have different angles). I now adjust the $70^\circ$ lower-left angle in P2 by the discrepancy in the corresponding angle in the quadrilaterals (and projecting again); since there is still an angular difference discrepancy, the other angle is still different. Now I deal with the angular discrepancy, by decreasing the the area of P2 keeping the height and angles constant. This gives two quadrilaterals with equal angular excess, but spoils the exact agreement on the "$70^\circ$" angles.
Two further iterations of this using an approximate Newton's algorithm gives the spherical quadrilaterals above, which as you can see have angles that match to 8 decimal points and have quite different side lengths.