Abstract

Inspired by the classical Poincaré criterion about the instability of orientation preserving minimizing closed geodesics on surfaces, we investigate the relation intertwining the instability and the variational properties of periodic solutions of a non-autonomous Lagrangian on a finite dimensional Riemannian manifold. We establish a general criterion for a priori detecting the linear instability of a periodic orbit on a Riemannian manifold for a (maybe not Legendre convex) non-autonomous Lagrangian simply by looking at the parity of the spectral index, which is the right substitute of the Morse index in the framework of strongly indefinite variational problems and defined in terms of the spectral flow of a path of Fredholm quadratic forms on a Hilbert bundle.

Full Text
Published version (Free)

Talk to us

Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have

Schedule a call