Periodic orbits of Hamiltonian flows near symplectic extrema. (Q1858311)

The main result of this article is an existence theorem for periodic orbits on symplectic manifolds in the spirit of the Weinstein-Moser Theorem. It is shown that there exists at least one periodic orbit on a squence of energy levels converging to a compact Bott-nondegenerate submanifold on which the Hamiltonian is extremal. The periodic orbits are found as critical points of some functional on a loop space. As an application it is shown that a Hamiltonian system describing the motion of a charged particle on a compact manifold in a non-degenerate magnetic field possesses periodic orbits on a sequence of low energy levels.