On the Floer homology of cotangent bundles

Abstract

This paper concerns Floer homology for periodic orbits and for a Lagrangian intersection problem on the cotangent bundle of a compact orientable manifold M. The first result is a new uniform estimate for the solutions of the Floer equation, which allows to deal with a larger - and more natural - class of Hamiltonians. The second and main result is a new construction of the isomorphism between the Floer homology and the singular homology of the free loop space of M, in the periodic case, or of the based loop space of M, in the Lagrangian intersection problem. The idea for the construction of such an isomorphism is to consider a Hamiltonian which is the Legendre transform of a Lagrangian on TM, and to construct an isomorphism between the Floer complex and the Morse complex of the classical Lagrangian action functional on the space of free or based loops on M of Sobolev class W(1,2).