Rabinowitz Floer homology is the semi-infinite dimensional Morse homology in the sense of Floer associated to a Lagrange multiplier action functional used by Rabinowitz in his pioneering work on applying global methods to Hamiltonian dynamics. This action functional detects periodic orbits of fixed energy but arbitrary period. Since the period is allowed to be negative as well one can think of Rabinowitz Floer homology as a kind of Tate version of Symplectic homology. Rabinowitz Floer homology has a broad range of applications to various fields, including the theory of contact embeddings, magnetic fields and Mane's critical values, translated points, the global perturbation theory of Hamiltonian systems, the contactomorphism group, symplectic homology, and string topology. While the critical point equation is local the gradient flow equation is not local anymore so that one can think of Rabinowitz Floer homology as an example of a nonlocal Floer homology.
In the talks we plan to explain the construction of Rabinowitz Floer homology and discuss some of its applications.
The event consists of four lectures, two on Friday afternoon (November 15th) and two on Saturday morning (November 16th).
15:30 - 16:00 - Registration
16:00 - 17:00 - Urs Frauenfelder (Lecture I)
17:00 - 17:30 - Coffee break
17:30 - 18:30 - Kai Cieliebak (Lecture I)
19:30 - Conference dinner
10:00 - 11:00 - Kai Cieliebak (Lecture II)
11:00- 11:30 - Coffee break
11:30 - 12:30 - Urs Frauenfelder (Lecture II)