Chain recurrence, chain transitivity, Lyapunov functions and rigidity of Lagrangian submanifolds of optical hypersurfaces

Abstract: The aim of this paper is twofold. On the one hand, we discuss the notions of strong chain recurrence and strong chain transitivity for flows on metric spaces, together with their characterizations in terms of rigidity properties of Lipschitz Lyapunov functions. This part extends to flows some recent results for homeomorphisms of Fathi and Pageault. On the other hand, we use these characterisations to revisit the proof of a theorem of Paternain, Polterovich and Siburg concerning the inner rigidity of a Lagrangian submanifold $\Lambda$ contained in an optical hypersurface of a cotangent bundle, under the assumption that the dynamics on $\Lambda$ is strongly chain recurrent. We also prove an outer rigidity result for such a Lagrangian submanifold $\Lambda$, under the stronger assumption that the dynamics on $\Lambda$ is strongly chain transitive.