A \(K\)-theoretical invariant and bifurcation for a parameterized family of functionals (Q629234)

The aim of this article is to establish an abstract bifurcation result in a form suitable for application to geometric variational problems. Given two normed linear spaces \(E\) and \(F\) and a continuous family of Fredholm maps \(h : X \times E \to F \) continuously parametrized by a path-connected topological space such that \(h(\cdot,0) = 0,\) a point \(x_* \in X\) is said to be a bifurcation point from the trivial branch \(X \times [0]\) if each neighborhood of \((x_*, 0)\) contains solutions of \(h(x, v) = 0\) with \(v \neq 0\). It is known that there exists a strict relation between the topology of the parameter space and the existence of a bifurcation point from the trivial branch, and thus an important role is played by homotopy-theoretical methods. The literature on this topic is quite broad. Contributions were given in the past decades mainly by Alexander, Ize, Fitzpatrick and Pejsachowicz. The inspiration for the author's results are articles of Fitzpatrick and Pejsachowicz [\textit{P. M. Fitzpatrick} and \textit{J. Pejsachowicz}, J. Funct. Anal. 98, No.~1, 42--58 (1991; Zbl 0736.47011); \textit{J. Pejsachowicz}, Topol. Methods Nonlinear Anal. 18, No.~2, 243--267 (2001; Zbl 1033.58021)], where they defined a bifurcation invariant which could roughly be seen as a global version of Alexander's invariant. In fact, given a family of quasilinear Fredholm maps of index zero continuously parameterized by a smooth compact manifold \( X\) with \(f_x(0) = 0,\) the obstruction to deforming such a family to a family of isomorphisms is the analytical index (or index bundle), namely, an element of the Grothendieck group of virtual vector bundles \(K^0(X)\), and quite naturally the bifurcation invariant in this setting is provided by \(J(\operatorname{Ind}\,L)\), where \(J\) is the \(J\)-homomorphism of Atiyah-Adams. More precisely, they proved that, if \(f\) is such a family, then there is a homotopy invariant belonging to the first (singular) cohomology group with \(\mathbb{Z}^2\) coefficients whose non-triviality insures the existence of a bifurcation point from the trivial branch. This invariant is nothing but the first Stiefel-Whitney class of the analytical index and its non-triviality can be geometrically interpreted as the non-orientability of the index bundle. However, all the quoted articles are non-variational in nature and the situation in the variational case is fundamentally different. For this reason, in this article, the author restricts himself to the case of families of self-adjoint Fredholm maps which naturally arise in calculus of variations, by showing that, in this situation, a more refined invariant arises. In this case, in fact, it is shown that the bifurcation is related to the non-triviality of the first Chern class of the index bundle instead of the first Stiefel-Whitney class. Moreover, by using this invariant, a result is proved about the Lebesgue covering dimension of the bifurcation set. As an application of the main result, the author gives a quantitative result on the bifurcation set for a several parameter family of perturbed geodesics on a semi-Riemannian manifold.