Infinitely many homoclinic orbits for superlinear Hamiltonian systems (Q446204)

The authors consider the non-autonomous Hamiltonian system \(\dot z= JH_z(t,z)\), where \(z= (p,q)\in \mathbb{R}^N\times \mathbb{R}^N\), \(J= \begin{pmatrix} O & I_N\\ -I_N & O\end{pmatrix}\), \(I_n\) is the \(N\times N\) identity matrix, and \(H\in C^1(\mathbb{R}\times \mathbb{R}^{2N},\mathbb{R})\) has the form \[ H(t,z)=\textstyle{{1\over 2}} B(t) z\cdot z+ R(t,z). \] Here \(B(t)\in C(\mathbb{R},\mathbb{R}^{2N}\times \mathbb{R}^{2N})\) is a \(2N\times 2N\) symmetric matrix-valued function, and \(R\in (\mathbb{R}\times \mathbb{R}^{2N},\mathbb{R})\) is superlinear in \(z\). The primary question that the authors address is the existence of homoclinic orbits for this system, i.e., orbits \(z(t)\), not identically zero, such that \(z(t)\to 0\) as \(|t|\to\infty\). The authors prove that, under a number of technical conditions, there are infinitely many geometrically distinct homoclinic orbits. The technical conditions include an assumption about the self-adjoint operator \(A=-(J{d\over dt}+ B(t))\); namely, that \(B(t)\) is periodic of period 1 and there is an \(\alpha> 0\) such that \(\sigma(A)\cap(0,\alpha)\neq\emptyset\), where \(\sigma(A)\) is the spectrum of \(A\). The other technical conditions constraint the behavior of \(R(t,z)\).