On the Rabinowitz Floer homology of twisted cotangent bundles

Let (M, g) be a closed connected orientable Riemannian manifold of dimension n????2. Let ??:?=??? ₀?+??? ^* ?? denote a twisted symplectic form on T ^* M, where ${\sigma\in\Omega^{2}(M)}$ is a closed 2-form and ?? ₀ is the canonical symplectic structure ${dp\wedge dq}$ on T ^* M. Suppose that ?? is weakly exact and its pullback to the universal cover ${\widetilde{M}}$ admits a bounded primitive. Let ${H:T^{*}M\rightarrow\mathbb{R}}$ be a Hamiltonian of the form ${(q,p)\mapsto\frac{1}{2}\left|p\right|^{2}+U(q)}$ for ${U\in C^{\infty}(M,\mathbb{R})}$ . Let ?? _k :?=?H ^?1(k), and suppose that k?>?c(g, ??, U), where c(g, ??, U) denotes the Ma?é critical value. In this paper we compute the Rabinowitz Floer homology of such hypersurfaces. Under the stronger condition that k?>?c ₀(g, ??, U), where c ₀(g, ??, U) denotes the strict Ma?é critical value, Abbondandolo and Schwarz (J Topol Anal 1:307?C405, 2009) recently computed the Rabinowitz Floer homology of such hypersurfaces, by means of a short exact sequence of chain complexes involving the Rabinowitz Floer chain complex and the Morse (co)chain complex associated to the free time action functional. We extend their results to the weaker case k?>?c(g, ??, U), thus covering cases where ?? is not exact. As a consequence, we deduce that the hypersurface ?? _k is never (stably) displaceable for any k?>?c(g, ??, U). This removes the hypothesis of negative curvature in Cieliebak et?al. (Geom Topol 14:1765?C1870, 2010, Theorem 1.3) and thus answers a conjecture of Cieliebak, Frauenfelder and Paternain raised in Cieliebak et?al. (2010). Moreover, following Albers and Frauenfelder (2009; J Topol Anal 2:77?C98, 2010) we prove that for k?>?c(g, ??, U), any ${\psi\in\mbox{Ham}_{c}(T^{*}M,\omega)}$ has a leaf-wise intersection point in ?? _k , and that if in addition ${\dim\, H_{*}(\Lambda M;\mathbb{Z}_{2})=\infty}$ , dim M????2, and the metric g is chosen generically, then for a generic ${\psi\in\mbox{Ham}_{c}(T^{*}M,\omega)}$ there exist infinitely many such leaf-wise intersection points.