Variational Methods in Geometry Seminar

A Riemannian manifold is called Besse, if all of its geodesics are periodic. The goal of this talk is to study the energy functional on the free loop space of a Besse manifold. In particular, we show that this is a perfect Morse-Bott function for the rational, relative, S1-equivariant cohomology of the free loop space. We will show how this result is crucial in proving a conjecture of Berger for spheres of dimension at least 4, although it might be useful for proving the conjecture in full generality.