A continuation principle for forced oscillations on differentiable manifolds (Q759889)

The paper is concerned with the existence of T-periodic solutions of the differential equation \(\dot x(\)t)\(=f(t,x(t))\), \(t\in {\mathbb{R}}\), where f is a continuous time dependent T-periodic tangent vector field defined on an n-dimensional differentiable manifold M possibly with boundary. It is proved that if the Euler characteristic of the average vector field \(w(p)=(1/T)\int^{T}_{0}f(t,p)dt\) is defined and nonzero and if all the possible orbits of the parametrized equation \(\dot x(\)t)\(=\lambda f(t,x(t))\), \(t\in {\mathbb{R}}\) and \(\lambda\in (0,1]\) lie in a compact set and do not hit the boundary of M, then the given equation admits a T- periodic solution. This ''continuation principle'' unifies in a global setting many well-known and apparently not related results such as, for instance, the Poincaré-Hopf theorem, a classical Krasnosel'skij's existence result, Mawhin's continuation principle on forced oscillations.