An Analytical Analogue of Morse's Lemma

Abstract

The Morse function $f$ near a non-degenerate critical point $p$ is understood topologically, in the light of Morse's lemma. However, Morse's lemma standardizes the function $f$ itself, providing little information of how the gradient $\nabla f$ behaves. In this paper, we prove an analytical analogue of Morse's lemma, showing that there exist smooth local coordinates on which a generic Morse gradient field $\nabla f$ near the critical point exhibits a unique linear vector field. We show that on a small neighbourhood of the critical point, the gradient field $\nabla f$ has a natural choice of standard form $V_0(\mathbb{x})=\sum_{i=1}^n λ_ix_i\frac{\partial}{\partial x_i}$, and this form only depend on the local behaviour of the Morse function and the Riemannian metric near the critical point. Then we present a constructive proof of the fact that given a generic Morse function $f$, for every critical point, there is a local coordinate on which the gradient field reduces to its standard form.