Floer Homology and the Heat Flow

We study the heat flow in the loop space of a closed Riemannian manifold M as an adiabatic limit of the Floer equations in the cotangent bundle. Our main application is a proof that the Floer homology of the cotangent bundle, for the Hamiltonian function kinetic plus potential energy, is naturally isomorphic to the homology of the loop space. J.W. received partial financial support from TH-Projekt 00321. Received: December 2004 Revision: September 2005 Accepted: September 2005