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Abstract For about 25 years, global methods from the calculus of variations have been used to establish the existence of chaotic behavior for some classes of dynamical systems. Like the analytical approaches that were used earlier, these methods require nondegeneracy conditions, but of a weaker nature than their predecessors. Our goal here is study such a nondegeneracy condition that has proved useful in several contexts including some involving partial differential equations, and to show this condition has an equivalent formulation involving stable and unstable manifolds. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper studies a Hamiltonian system possessing a double well potential for which the existence of multitransition heteroclinic and homoclinic solutions that are local minimizers of an associated functional is known. Under an additional mild non-degeneracy condition on the set of all homoclinic and heteroclinic solutions, the existence of further heteroclinic and homoclinic solutions that are of mountain pass type is established. A key tool for the existence arguments is a variant of the Mountain Pass Theorem that is of independent interest. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]