Intersections of Lagrangian submanifolds and the Mel'nikov 1-form

Abstract

We make explicit the geometric content of Mel'nikov's method for detecting heteroclinic points between transversally hyperbolic periodic orbits. After developing the general theory of intersections for pairs of family of Lagrangian submanifolds constrained to live in an auxiliary family of submanifolds, we explain how the heteroclinic orbits are detected by the zeros of the Mel'nikov 1 -form. This 1 -form admits an integral expression, which is non-convergent in general. Finally, we discuss different solutions to this convergence problem.