No Arabic abstract
The three-body problem is a fundamental long-standing open problem, with applications in all branches of physics, including astrophysics, nuclear physics and particle physics. In general, conserved quantities allow to reduce the formulation of a mechanical problem to fewer degrees of freedom, a process known as dynamical reduction. However, extant reductions are either non-general, or hide the problems symmetry or include unexplained definitions. This paper presents a dynamical reduction that avoids these issues, and hence is general and natural. Any three-body configuration defines a triangle, and its orientation in space. Accordingly, we decompose the dynamical variables into the geometry (shape + size) and orientation of the triangle. The geometry variables are shown to describe the motion of an abstract point in a curved 3d space, subject to a potential-derived force and a magnetic-like force with a monopole charge. The orientation variables are shown to obey a dynamics analogous to the Euler equations for a rotating rigid body, only here the moments of inertia depend on the geometry variables, rather than being constant. The reduction rests on a novel symmetric solution to the center of mass constraint inspired by Lagranges solution to the cubic. The formulation of the orientation variables is novel and rests on a little known generalization of the Euler-Lagrange equations to non-coordinate velocities. Applications to special exact solutions and to the statistical solution are described or discussed. Moreover, a generalization to the four-body problem is presented.
Eulers three-body problem is the problem of solving for the motion of a particle moving in a Newtonian potential generated by two point sources fixed in space. This system is integrable in the Liouville sense. We consider the Euler problem with the inverse-square potential, which can be seen as a natural generalization of the three-body problem to higher-dimensional Newtonian theory. We identify a family of stable stationary orbits in the generalized Euler problem. These orbits guarantee the existence of stable bound orbits. Applying the Poincare map method to these orbits, we show that stable bound chaotic orbits appear. As a result, we conclude that the generalized Euler problem is nonintegrable.
The Hannay angle has been previously studied for a celestial circular restricted three-body system by means of an adiabatic approach. In the present work, three main results are obtained. Firstly, a formal connection between perturbation theory and the Hamiltonian adiabatic approach shows that both lead to the Hannay angle; it is thus emphasised that this effect is already contained in classical celestial mechanics, although not yet defined nor evaluated separately. Secondly, a more general expression of the Hannay angle, valid for an action-dependent potential is given; such a generalised expression takes into account that the restricted three-body problem is a time-dependent, two degrees of freedom problem even when restricted to the circular motion of the test body. Consequently, (some of) the eccentricity terms cannot be neglected {it a priori}. Thirdly, we present a new numerical estimate for the Earth adiabatically driven by Jupiter. We also point out errors in a previous derivation of the Hannay angle for the circular restricted three-body problem, with an action-independent potential.
We study chaos and Levy flights in the general gravitational three-body problem. We introduce new metrics to characterize the time evolution and final lifetime distributions, namely Scramble Density $mathcal{S}$ and the LF index $mathcal{L}$, that are derived from the Agekyan-Anosova maps and homology radius $R_{mathcal{H}}$. Based on these metrics, we develop detailed procedures to isolate the ergodic interactions and Levy flight interactions. This enables us to study the three-body lifetime distribution in more detail by decomposing it into the individual distributions from the different kinds of interactions. We observe that ergodic interactions follow an exponential decay distribution similar to that of radioactive decay. Meanwhile, Levy flight interactions follow a power-law distribution. Levy flights in fact dominate the tail of the general three-body lifetime distribution, providing conclusive evidence for the speculated connection between power-law tails and Levy flight interactions. We propose a new physically-motivated model for the lifetime distribution of three-body systems and discuss how it can be used to extract information about the underlying ergodic and Levy flight interactions. We discuss mass ejection probabilities in three-body systems in the ergodic limit and compare it to previous ergodic formalisms. We introduce a novel mechanism for a three-body relaxation process and discuss its relevance in general three-body systems.
We present an extensive comparison between the statistical properties of non-hierarchical three-body systems and the corresponding three-body theoretical predictions. We perform and analyze 1 million realizations for each different initial condition considering equal and unequal mass three-body systems to provide high accuracy statistics. We measure 4 quantities characterizing the statistical distribution of ergodic disintegrations: escape probability of each body, the characteristic exponent for escapes by a narrow margin, predicted absorptivity as a function of binary energy and binary angular momentum, and, finally, the lifetime distribution. The escape probabilities are shown to be in agreement down to the 1% level with the emissivity-blind, flux-based theoretical prediction. This represents a leap in accuracy compared to previous three-body statistical theories. The characteristic exponent at the threshold for marginally unbound escapes is an emissivity-independent flux-based prediction, and the measured values are found to agree well with the prediction. We interpret both tests as strong evidence for the flux-based three-body statistical formalism. The predicted absorptivity and lifetime distributions are measured to enable future tests of statistical theories.
We study the dynamical chaos and integrable motion in the planar circular restricted three-body problem and determine the fractal dimension of the spiral strange repeller set of non-escaping orbits at different values of mass ratio of binary bodies and of Jacobi integral of motion. We find that the spiral fractal structure of the Poincare section leads to a spiral density distribution of particles remaining in the system. We also show that the initial exponential drop of survival probability with time is followed by the algebraic decay related to the universal algebraic statistics of Poincare recurrences in generic symplectic maps.