On the existence of infinitely many closed geodesics on non-compact manifolds

Abstract

We prove that any complete (and possibly non-compact) Riemannian manifold $M$ possesses infinitely many closed geodesics provided its free loop space has unbounded Betti numbers in degrees larger than the dimension of $M$, and there are no close conjugate points at infinity. Our argument builds on an existence result due to Benci and Giannoni, and generalizes the celebrated theorem of Gromoll and Meyer for closed manifolds.