No Arabic abstract
Recent developments on three body systems have revealed that dynamics of trajectories passing through collinear configurations can be easily adopted. We analyse the reduction procedure in order to detect the points where collinear configurations are deviating. Then we show that the value of the reduced Hamiltonian can be computed at these points.
We study the spatial central configuration formed by two twisted regular $N$-polygons. For any twist angle $theta$ and any ratio of the masses $b$ in the two regular $N$-polygons, we prove that the sizes of the two regular $N$-polygons must be equal.
The dynamics of a beam held on a horizontal frame by springs and bouncing off a step is described by a separable two degrees of freedom Hamiltonian system with impacts that respect, point wise, the separability symmetry. The energy in each degree of freedom is preserved, and the motion along each level set is conjugated, via action angle coordinates, to a geodesic flow on a flat two-dimensional surface in the four dimensional phase space. Yet, for a range of energies, these surfaces are not the simple Liouville-Arnold tori - these are tori of genus two, thus the motion on them is not conjugated to simple rotations. Namely, even though energy is not transferred between the two degrees of freedom, the impact system is quasi-integrable and is not of the Liouville-Arnold type. In fact, for each level set in this range, the motion is conjugated to the well studied and highly non-trivial dynamics of directional motion in L-shaped billiards, where the billiard area and shape as well as the direction of motion vary continuously on iso-energetic level sets. Return maps to Poincare section of the flow are shown to be conjugated, on each level set, to interval exchange maps which are computed, up to quadratures, in the general nonlinear case and explicitly for the case of two linear oscillators bouncing off a step. It is established that for any such oscillator-step system there exist step locations for which some of the level sets exhibit motion which is neither periodic nor ergodic. Changing the impact surface by introducing additional steps, staircases, strips and blocks from which the particle is reflected, leads to iso-energy surfaces that are foliated by families of genus-k level set surfaces, where the number and order of families of genus k depend on the energy.
Assume that a Hamiltonian system is monotone. In this paper, we give several characterizations on when such a system is Anosov. Assuming that a monotone Hamiltonian system has no conjugate point, we show that there are two distributions which are invariant under the Hamiltonian flow. We show that a monotone Hamiltonian flow without conjugate point is Anosov if and only if these distributions are transversal. We also show that if the reduced curvature of the Hamiltonian system is non-positive, then the flow is Anosov if and only if the reduced curvature is negative somewhere along each trajectory.
For the Newtonian (gravitational) $n$-body problem in the Euclidean $d$-dimensional space, the simplest possible solutions are provided by those rigid motions (homographic solutions) in which each body moves along a Keplerian orbit and the configuration of the $n$-body is a constant up to rotations and scalings named textit{central configuration}. For $dleq 3$, the only possible homographic motions are those given by central configurations. For $d geq 4$ instead, new possibilities arise due to the higher complexity of the orthogonal group $O(d)$, as observed by Albouy and Chenciner. For instance, in $mathbb R^4$ it is possible to rotate in two mutually orthogonal planes with different angular velocities. This produces a new balance between gravitational forces and centrifugal forces providing new periodic and quasi-periodic motions. So, for $dgeq 4$ there is a wider class of $S$-textit{balanced configurations} (containing the central ones) providing simple solutions of the $n$-body problem, which can be characterized as well through critical point theory. In this paper, we first provide a lower bound on the number of balanced (non-central) configurations in $mathbb R^d$, for arbitrary $dgeq 4$, and establish a version of the $45^circ$-theorem for balanced configurations, thus answering some questions raised by Moeckel. Also, a careful study of the asymptotics of the coefficients of the Poincare polynomial of the collision free configuration sphere will enable us to derive some rather unexpected qualitative consequences on the count of $S$-balanced configurations. In the last part of the paper, we focus on the case $d=4$ and provide a lower bound on the number of periodic and quasi-periodic motions of the gravitational $n$-body problem which improves a previous celebrated result of McCord.
For the gravitational $n$-body problem, the simplest motions are provided by those rigid motions in which each body moves along a Keplerian orbit and the shape of the system is a constant (up to rotations and scalings) configuration featuring suitable properties. While in dimension $d leq 3$ the configuration must be central, in dimension $d geq 4$ new possibilities arise due to the complexity of the orthogonal group, and indeed there is a wider class of $S$-balanced configurations, containing central ones, which yield simple solutions of the $n$-body problem. Starting from recent results of the first and third authors, we study the existence of continua of bifurcations branching from a trivial branch of collinear $S$-balanced configurations and provide an estimate from below on the number of bifurcation instants. In the last part of the paper, by using the continuation method, we explicitly display the bifurcation branches in the case of the three body problem for different choices of the masses.