Fredholm pseudo-gradients for the action functional on a sub-manifold of dual Legendrian curves of a three dimensional contact manifold \((M^3,\alpha)\) (Q2254876)

In this paper it is proved that the intersection numbers between periodic orbits have an intrinsic meaning for the variational problem. This is a short paper and its main result is stated in Proposition 2.1. This proposition is about the intersection number of two periodic orbits when there is no other periodic orbit or critical point at infinity in between their energy levels (for the action functional). This can be readily extended to allow for intermediate critical points with zero intersection numbers with the dominating or with the dominated periodic orbit, depending on their index.