Published online by Cambridge University Press: 13 March 2014
We study the Peierls barrier $P_{\omega }(\xi )$ for a broad class of monotone variational problems. These problems arise naturally in solid state physics and from Hamiltonian twist maps. We start by deriving an estimate for the difference $\vert P_{\omega }(\xi ) - P_{q/p}(\xi ) \vert $ of the Peierls barriers of rotation numbers $\omega \in {{\mathbb{R}}}$ and $q/p\in {\mathbb{Q}}$. A similar estimate was obtained by Mather [Modulus of continuity for Peierls’s barrier. Proc. NATO Advanced Research Workshop on Periodic Solutions of Hamiltonian Systems and Related Topics (Il Ciocco, Italy, 13–18 October 1986) (NATO Adv. Sci. Inst. Ser. C Math. Phys. Sci., 209). Eds. P. H. Rabinowitz, A. Ambrosetti and I. Eckeland. D. Reidel, Dordrecht, 1987, pp. 177–202] in the context of twist maps, but our proof is different and applies more generally. It follows from the estimate that $\omega \mapsto P_{\omega }(\xi )$ is continuous at irrational points. Moreover, we show that the Peierls barrier depends continuously on parameters and hence that the property that a monotone variational problem admits a lamination of minimizers of rotation number $\omega \in {{\mathbb{R}}}\delimiter "026E30F {\mathbb{Q}}$ is open in the $C^1$-topology.