Boundary-value problems for Hamiltonian systems and absolute minimizers in calculus of variations

Abstract

We apply the method of Hamilton shooting to obtain the well-posedness of boundary value problems for certain Hamiltonian systems and some estimates for their solutions. The examples of Hamiltonian functions covered by the method include elliptic polynomials and exponentially growing functions. As a consequence we prove global existence, smoothness and almost everywhere uniqueness of absolute minimizers in the corresponding problem of calculus of variations and hence construct the global field of extremals.