A Viscosity Method for the Min-Max Construction of Closed Geodesics

Abstract

We present a viscosity approach to the min-max construction of closed geodesics on compact Riemannian manifolds of arbitrary dimension. We also construct counter-examples in dimension $1$ and $2$ to the $\varepsilon$-regularity in the convergence procedure. Furthermore, we prove the lower semi-continuity of the index of our sequence of critical points converging towards a closed non-trivial geodesic.