Symplectic aspects of Mather theory (Q869985)

It is proved that Mather set, Aubry set and Mañé set, introduced by John Mather in Lagrangian dynamics, are symplectic invariants. In order to do so, the author defines a barrier function on phase space, which is a symplectic analogue of the Peierl's barrier function. Then he proposes definitions of Aubry and Mañé sets for general (not necessarily convex) Hamiltonians, and proves that the objects he defines are invariant under exact symplectic transformations. In the closing section, it is verified that the symplectic definitions, proposed in this paper, coincide with the standard ones in the case of convex Hamiltonians. Recall that the standard definitions of the Mather theory assume the convexity of the Hamiltonian. Thus, this paper proposes an extension of the Aubry-Mather theory to nonconvex Hamiltonians.