Solutions of mountain pass type for double well potential systems

Abstract

This paper studies a Hamiltonian system possessing a double well potential for which the existence of multitransition heteroclinic and homoclinic solutions that are local minimizers of an associated functional is known. Under an additional mild non-degeneracy condition on the set of all homoclinic and heteroclinic solutions, the existence of further heteroclinic and homoclinic solutions that are of mountain pass type is established. A key tool for the existence arguments is a variant of the Mountain Pass Theorem that is of independent interest.