Critical points theorems concerning strongly indefinite functionals and infinite many periodic solutions for a class of Hamiltonian systems (Q2391302)

The authors study the existence of nontrivial critical points of strong indefinite functionals which do not satisfy the Palais-Smale condition. This article is motivated by the following reason: when dealing with superlinear differential equations, one often meets functionals which do not satisfy the Ambrosetti-Rabinowitz (AR) condition: there is \(\mu>2\) such that (AR) \(0<\mu G(x,u)\leq G_u(x,u)u\) for all \(x\in \mathbb{R}^n\) and \(u\in \mathbb{R}\setminus \{0\}\). Without the (AR) condition it is unknown whether a Palais-Smale sequence is bounded. Here a new deformation theorem is proved concerning strongly indefinite functionals and also new critical points theorems concerning strongly indefinite functionals with the Cerami condition instead of the Palais-Smale condition. As application of these abstract results the existence of multiple periodic solutions for a class of non-autonomous first order Hamiltonian systems \[ \dot{z}=JH_z(t,x,z),\quad (t,x)\in \mathbb{R}\times \Omega,\;\Omega\subset\mathbb{R}^N,\;N\geq 1,\;J=\begin{pmatrix} 0&I\\ -I&0 \end{pmatrix}, \] where \(\Omega\) is a bounded domain with smooth boundary \(\partial \Omega, z=(p,q)\in \mathbb{R}^M\times \mathbb{R}^M=\mathbb{R}^{2M},\) \(H(t,x,z)\in C^1(\mathbb{R}\times \Omega \times \mathbb{R}^{2M},\mathbb{R})\).