Existence and multiplicity of normal geodesics in Lorentzian manifolds (Q5950225)

In this paper, the authors prove some results concerning the existence and the multiplicity of normal geodesics joining two given submanifolds of an orthogonal splitting Lorentzian manifold. The proofs are based on variational techniques. Indeed, in semi-Riemannian geometry, the normal geodesics appear as critical points of an unbounded suitable action functional which is defined on a certain space of curves. The authors use a ``saddle-point theorem'' which is a generalization of a minimum argument, and they use a notion of relative category theory which had already been applied to obtain multiplicity results.