Bouncing Jacobi fields and the Allen-Cahn equation on surfaces

Abstract

The Allen-Cahn functional is a well studied variational problem which appears in the modeling of phase transition phenomenon. This functional depends on a parameter $\varepsilon >0$ and is intimately related to the area functional as the parameter $\varepsilon$ tends to $0$. In the case where the ambient manifold is a compact surface, we give sufficient assumptions which guarantee the existence of countable families of critical points of the Allen-Cahn functional whose nodal sets converge with multiplicity $2$ to a given embedded geodesic, while their energies and Morse indices stays uniformly bounded, as the parameter $\varepsilon$ tends to $0$. This result is specific to two dimensional surfaces and, for generic metric, it does not occur in higher dimension.