On Mañé's Critical Value for Tonelli Lagrangians on Half Lie-Groups

In this article, we introduce Tonelli Lagrangians on half-Lie groups equipped with a strong right-invariant Riemannian metric. These are right-invariant Lagrangians defined on the tangent bundle of a half-Lie group with quadratic growth on each fiber. The main examples of half-Lie groups are groups of $H^s$ or $C^k$ diffeomorphisms of compact manifolds. We show that the Euler–Lagrange flow exists globally. We then introduce three thresholds of the energy, called the Ma~ne critical values, and prove that under mild regularity and completeness assumptions on the half-Lie group, any two points can be connected by a global Tonelli minimizer above the lowest of these energy thresholds. Under an additional assumption on the Lagrangian, such a minimizer is a flow line of the Euler–Lagrange flow. This extends the work of Contreras from closed finite-dimensional manifolds to the infinite-dimensional context. Moreover, our results also extend the recent work of Bauer, Harms, and Michor from geodesic flows to Euler–Lagrange flows of Tonelli Lagrangians. As an application, we obtain global well-posedness of all Euler–Poincare’e equations associated with Tonelli Lagrangians on half-Lie groups equipped with strong right-invariant Riemannian metrics.