On Aubry sets and Mather's action functional

Abstract

We study Lagrangian systems on a closed manifold. We link the differentiability of Mather's beta-function with the topological complexity of the complement of the Aubry set. As a consequence, when the dimension of the manifold is less than or equal to two, the differentiability of the beta-function at a given homology class is forced by the irrationality of the homology class. As an application we prove the two-dimensional case of a conjecture by Ricardo Mane.