Aubry-Mather theory for contact Hamiltonian systems (Q1736249)

The goal of this paper is to formulate an Aubry-Mather theory for contact Hamiltonian systems. The authors develop criteria for action-minimizing methods for such systems. Their work involves taking basic results for Aubry-Mather systems together with prior results in weak KAM theory for conventional Hamiltonian systems. The authors look at the contact manifold as the manifold of 1-jets on a connected, closed and smooth Riemannian manifold \(M\) with a $C^\infty$ metric. They note that such a manifold is canonically diffeomorphic to T$^*M\times\mathbb{R}$. In local coordinates the equations of the contact flow generated by the Hamiltonian H are: $\dot{x}=\frac{\partial H}{\partial p}(x, u, p)$; $\dot{p}=\frac{\partial H}{\partial x}$ $(x,u,p)-\frac{\partial H}{\partial u}(x, u, p)$ $p$; and $\dot{u}=\frac{\partial H}{\partial p}$ $(x,u,p)\cdot p-H(x,u,p)$ for $(x,u,p) \in T^*M\times\mathbb{R}$. The authors make the following assumptions: (1) For every $(x,u,p) \in T^*M\times\mathbb{R}$, the second derivative $\frac{\partial ^2 H}{\partial p^2}$ is positive definite; (2) $H(x,u,p)$ is superlinear in $p$ for every $(x,u) \in M \times\mathbb{R}$; and (3) There is a positive constant $\lambda$ such that $0<\frac{\partial H}{\partial p}(x, u, p)\leq\lambda$ for every $(x,u,p) \in T^*M\times\mathbb{R}$. For their main results, the authors also need an admissability assumption: there exists an $a \in\mathbb{R}$ such that the Mañé critical value $c(a)$ of $H(x,a,p)$ is zero. The authors' main theorems characterize the Aubry and Mather sets of contact Hamiltonians as well as the global minimizing curves.