The Conley conjecture and beyond (Q500664)

The Conley conjecture asserts that every Hamiltonian diffeomorphism has infinitely many simple periodic orbits subject to very natural conditions on the phase space. It has been proved for a large class of closed symplectic manifolds. The authors of this paper provide an excellent survey of this and related results. They examine in some detail the cases where the conjecture has been established; they also discuss the analogous conjecture for the Reeb flows and also the cases for which the conjecture is known to fail. The authors then look at local geometrical conditions that globally force the existence of infinitely many periodic orbits. The paper can be read in three different ways: to see a broad survey of results, to get sufficient technical detail to understand the statement of the most important results, and to follow the proof of the Conley conjecture that uses Floer homology. The authors also incorporate an example based on a physical application. This is the motion of a charged particle in a magnetic field on a Riemannian manifold.