On the Morse inequalities for geodesics on Lorentzian manifolds (Q1428320)

The authors show how to extend the classical Morse inequalities on the geodesics joining two nonconjugate points in a Riemannian manifold to two classes of Lorentzian manifolds. Let \((M,g)\) be a semi-Riemannian manifold and \(\Omega (M)\) be the based loop space of \(M\). For any \(k \in \mathbb N\) let \(G_k (p,q)\) be the number of geodesics joining two nonconjugate points \(p\) and \(q\) of \(M\) that have Morse index equal to \(k\) and let \(\beta_k ( \Omega(M);K)\) be the Betti numbers with respect to the field \(K.\) Recall that the Morse inequalities state that for any \(k \in \mathbb N\), \[ G_k (p,q)\geq \beta_k ( \Omega(M);K). \] Let \[ E(x)=\int_0 ^1 g(x(s))[\dot{x}(s),\dot{x}(s)]\,ds \] be the action integral defined on the infinite dimensional manifold of sufficiently smooth curves on \(M\) joining \(p\) and \(q\). The Morse index of any geodesic as a critical point of \(E\) on a Lorentzian manifold is equal to \(+\infty.\) Such functionals are called strongly indefinite. An abstract Morse theory for a class of strongly indefinite functionals satisfying certain assumptions, including a version of a Palais-Smale condition, and that allow the principal part of the second derivative of the functional to depend on the critical points is developed in this article. This theory is then applied to two specific, but broad classes of Lorentzian manifolds and the Morse inequalities are established in these two settings. The two well-known classes of Lorentzian manifolds to which the theory is applied are stationary manifolds and orthogonal splitting manifolds. In the case of stationary manifolds, the Morse relations are also established. In the case of orthogonal splitting manifolds, the authors leave the Morse relations as an open problem. The theorems require certain assumptions on the coefficients of the Lorentzian metric. Major results with definitions and discussion are included in the article but proofs are omitted and are to be published elsewhere. Counterexamples are provided to show that the Morse inequalities do not hold if the assumptions on the metric coefficients are not satisfied.