Résumé en anglais

We consider a noncompact hypersurface H in R2N which is the energy level of a singular Hamiltonian of “strong force” type. Under global geometric assumptions on H, we prove that it carries a closed characteristic, as a consequence of a result by Hofer and Viterbo on the Weinstein conjecture in cotangent bundles of compact manifolds. Our theorem contains, as particular cases, earlier results on the fixed energy problem for singular Lagrangian systems of strong force type.