Existence of a periodic solution for superlinear second order ODEs

Abstract

We prove a necessary and sufficient condition for the existence of a $T$-periodic solution for the time-periodic second order differential equation $\ddot{x}+f(t,x)+p(t,x,\dot x)=0$, where $f$ grows superlinearly in $x$ uniformly in time, while $p$ is bounded. Our method is based on a fixed-point theorem which uses the rotational properties of the dynamics.