Lyapunov 1-forms for flows

M. Farber, T. Kappeler, J. Latschev, E. Zehnder

Published 2002-10-31, updated 2003-02-10Version 2

In this paper we find conditions which guarantee that a given flow $\Phi$ on a compact metric space $X$ admits a Lyapunov one-form $\omega$ lying in a prescribed \v{C}ech cohomology class $\xi\in \check H^1(X;\R)$. These conditions are formulated in terms of the restriction of $\xi$ to the chain recurrent set of $\Phi$. The result of the paper may be viewed as a generalization of a well-known theorem of C. Conley about the existence of Lyapunov functions.