Nonlinear Analysis 72 (2010) 4575–4586 Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Nonlinear Analysis journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/na The multiplicity of solutions for perturbed second-order Hamiltonian systems with impulsive effects Juntao Sun a, , Haibo Chen a , Juan J. Nieto b , Mario Otero-Novoa b a Department of Mathematics, Central South University, Changsha, 410075 Hunan, People’s Republic of China b Departamento de Análisis Matemático, Universidad de Santiago de Compostela, Santiago de Compostela 15782, Spain article info Article history: Received 5 December 2009 Accepted 17 February 2010 MSC: 34B37 37J45 70H05 70H12 Keywords: Hamiltonian systems Perturbed Impulsive effects Critical points Variational method abstract In this paper, we study the existence of multiple solutions for a class of second-order impulsive Hamiltonian systems. We give some new criteria for guaranteeing that the impulsive Hamiltonian systems with a perturbed term have at least three solutions by using a variational method and some critical points theorems of B. Ricceri. We extend and improve on some recent results. Finally, some examples are presented to illustrate our main results. © 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. 1. Introduction In this paper, we consider the following problem: −¨ u + A(t )u = λF (t , u) + µG(t , u), a.e. t ∈[0, T ], ( ˙ u i (t j )) u i (t + j ) −˙ u i (t j ) = I ij (u i (t j )), i = 1, 2,..., N , j = 1, 2,..., l, u(0) u(T ) u(0) −˙ u(T ) = 0, (1.1) where A :[0, T ]→ R N×N is a continuous map from the interval [0, T ] to the set of N -order symmetric matrices, λ,µ R, T is a real positive number, u(t ) = (u 1 (t ), u 2 (t ),..., u N (t )), t j , j = 1, 2,..., l, are the instants where the impulses occur and 0 = t 0 < t 1 < t 2 < ··· < t l < t l+1 = T , I ij : R R (i = 1, 2,..., N , j = 1, 2,..., l) are continuous and F , G :[0, T R N R are measurable with respect to t , for every u R N , continuously differentiable in u, for almost every t ∈[0, T ] and satisfy the following standard summability condition: sup |u|≤b (max{|F (·, u)|, |G(·, u)|, |∇F (·, u)|, |∇G(·, u)|}) L 1 ([0, T ]) (1.2) for all b > 0. The first author was supported by the Graduate Degree Thesis Innovation Foundation of Central South University (CX2009B023). Corresponding author. E-mail addresses: sunjuntao2008@163.com (J. Sun), math_chb@mail.csu.cn (H. Chen), juanjose.nieto.roig@usc.es (J.J. Nieto). 0362-546X/$ – see front matter © 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.na.2010.02.034