On curvature and hyperbolicity of monotone Hamiltonian systems

Paul W. Y. Lee

Published 2012-02-17, updated 2012-07-28Version 3

Assume that a Hamiltonian system is monotone. In this paper, we give several characterizations on when such a system is Anosov. Assuming that a monotone Hamiltonian system has no conjugate point, we show that there are two distributions which are invariant under the Hamiltonian flow. We show that a monotone Hamiltonian flow without conjugate point is Anosov if and only if these distributions are transversal. We also show that if the reduced curvature of the Hamiltonian system is non-positive, then the flow is Anosov if and only if the reduced curvature is negative somewhere along each trajectory.