Spectral flow and iteration of closed semi-Riemannian geodesics (Q1006411)

The study of closed geodesics on a smooth Riemannian manifold \((M,g)\) is a very old and classical problem in geometry and calculus of variation going back to M.~Morse, R.~Bott and others. In particular, a very important problem is to study the Morse index and the multiplicity of closed geodesics. One of the main results is that for a closed geodesic \(\gamma(t) : [0,1] \to M\) its iterates \(\gamma^{(N)}(t) = \gamma(Nt)\), \(N \in {\mathbb N}\), either have Morse index that grows linearly with \(N\), or they have all null index. This paper is a study of the similar problems for closed geodesics in the case of smooth semi-Riemannian manifold \((M,g)\), i.e., \(g\) is a non-degenerate quadratic form on the tangent bundle \(TM\), which can be not non positive definite (for example, \(g\) can be Lorentzian metric). The authors introduce the notion of spectral flow along a periodic semi-Riemannian geodesic, as a suitable generalization of the Morse index of the geodesic action functional in the Riemannian case, and study the growth of the spectral flow along a closed geodesic under iteration, determining its asymptotic behavior.