Amount of rotation about a point and the Morse index (Q762815)

It has recently been shown by the author and Aubry, Le daeron, André that variational techniques can be used to find orbits with special properties in area-preserving monotone twist maps. The technique is to define an ''energy'' functional on a ''set of states'' or candidates for orbits of the map, then show that critical points of the energy functional correspond to orbits. Previous work has shown existence of orbits by showing that the functional takes on a global minimum value over the appropriate set of states. Of course, other critical points also correspond to orbits and in this paper the author relates the local nature of a general critical point of the energy functional with the local nature of the corresponding orbit. For the local nature of the critical point of the energy the Morse index is used. The local behavior of the orbit is the rotation number of the derivative applied to the unit tangent bundle at the orbit (e.g., for a saddle periodic orbit with positive eigenvalues this rotation number is an integer). It turns out that the Morse index over two is approximately this rotation number.