Iterations of anti-selfdual Lagrangians and applications to Hamiltonian systems and multiparameter gradient flows

Abstract

Anti-selfdual Lagrangians on a state space lift to path space provided one adds a suitable selfdual boundary Lagrangian. This process can be iterated by considering the path space as a new state space for the newly obtained anti-selfdual Lagrangian. We give here two applications for these remarkable permanence properties. In the first, we establish for certain convex-concave Hamiltonians ${\cal H}$ on a --possibly infinite dimensional--symplectic space $H^2$, the existence of a solution for the Hamiltonian system $-J\dot u (t)=\partial {\cal H} (u(t))$ that connects in a given time T>0, two Lagrangian submanifolds. Another application deals with the construction of a multiparameter gradient flow for a convex potential. Our methods are based on the new variational calculus for anti-selfdual Lagrangians developed in [4], [5] and [7].