Nonautonomous second order Hamiltonian systems (Q635679)

The author of this interesting paper studies the existence of periodic solutions for the second order nonautonomous dynamical system of the form \[ -\ddot x(t) = \nabla_xV(t,x(t)) , \] where \(x(t)=(x_1(t),\ldots ,x_n(t))\) is a map from the interval \(I=[0,T]\) to \(\mathbb{R}^n\) such that each component \(x_j(t)\) (\(j=1,\ldots ,n\)) is a periodic function (with period \(T\)) in the class \(H^1\). The function \(V(t,x)=V(t,x_1,\ldots ,x_n)\) is continuous and periodic in \(t\) from \(\mathbb{R}^{n+1}\) to \(\mathbb{R}\) with \(\nabla_xV(t,x) = (\partial V/\partial x_1,\ldots ,\partial V/\partial x_n)\in C(\mathbb{R}^{n+1},\mathbb{R}^n)\). This allows both sublinear and superlinear problems to be studied. It is assumed that \(0\leq \int\limits_{0}^{T}V(t,x)dt\to \infty \) as \(|x|\to \infty \), \(x\in \mathbb{R}^n\), and there is a constant \(\alpha >0\) and \(W(t)\in L^1(I)\) such that \(V(t,x)\leq \alpha |x|^2+W(t)\), \(t\in I\), \(x\in \mathbb{R}^n\). Then an interesting result is that the system under consideration has a solution for almost all such \(\beta \), estimated by \(0\leq \beta \leq 2\pi ^2/\alpha T^2\). If, in addition, it is assumed that \(B\equiv \int_{I}W(t)dt<0\), then there exists a nonconstant solution for almost all such \(\beta \). Several consequences stem from this statement.