Lectures on the free period Lagrangian action functional (Q395444)

This expository paper deals with the existence of periodic solutions on fixed energy surfaces of a certain type of Hamiltonain systems defined on the tangent bundle \(TM\) of a connected, closed, smooth manifold. The author considers Lagrangians \(L:TM\to\mathbb{R}\) that are fibrewise uniformly convex and superlinear (Tonelli Lagrangians). A special example are electromagnetic Lagrangians \[ L(x,v)=\frac{1}{2}|v|^2_x+\theta (x)[v]-V(x) \] where \(\theta\) is a smooth one-form on \(M\) (the magnetic potential) and \(V\) is a smooth function on \(M\) (the scalar potential). The article is an introduction to results of \textit{G. Contreras} [Calc. Var. Partial Differ. Equ. 27, No. 3, 321--395 (2006; Zbl 1105.37037)] containing proofs including those of well-known results like the mountain pass theorem.