Symplectic and contact properties of the Mañé critical value of the universal cover (Q2257037)

In this paper, the authors study various symplectic and virtual contact properties of the Mañé critical value \(c_u(H)\) of the universal cover of a Tonelli Hamiltonian \(H\). After a brief survey of the Mañé critical value and some properties in the case of a compact manifold, the authors study similar aspects for the universal cover. It is shown first, in Theorem A, that if \(\dim M \geq 3\), the energy level the Mañé critical value cannot be of virtual contact type. The proof of this result is done in Section 2. The symplectic invariance of \(c_u(H)\) is started in the first part of Theorem B and proved in Section 3. The next two items of Theorem B characterise when the Peierls barriers are finite and when the projective Aubrey sets are empty. To prove these aspects the authors investigate in Section 4 some symplectic properties for the lifting process of the Tonelli Hamiltonian to the universal cover. An important aspect in this study is to overcome all the difficulties that appear in the non-compact case: the lift of the energy level to the universal cover is non-compact; the projected Aubry set might be empty when the Peierls barrier is finite. The last item of Theorem B, which states that the Aubry set is a symplectic invariant, is proved in Section 5. In the last section the authors compute the Aubry set of the universal cover for some examples. In one example the Aubrey sets is empty while the Peierls barrier is finite. For the second example the authors show that all ergodic minimizing invariant measures with zero homotopy can described.