Timelike trajectories with fixed energy under a potential in static spacetimes (Q885650)

This paper treats with the motion of relativistic particles under a potential. More precisely, the author studies the connectedness of standard static spacetimes by timelike (negative fixed energy) trajectories under the action of an external scalar potential. Two different results are obtained when metric coefficients grow at most quadratically at infinity: the first one assuming a potential bounded from below and trajectories with energy smaller than the infimum of \(V\); and the second one for a more general potential possibly unbounded. As usual in this type of problems, the results are obtained by applying variational methods. The indefinite character of the Lorentzian metric lies to an unbounded (both from below and from above) action functional, which makes the classical topological methods useless. In spite of this, the initial variational problem is replaced by another one based on a Riemannian functional, whose critical points are obtained by using a minimization argument and Ljusternik-Schnirelmann category theory.