Stability in high dimensional steep repelling potentials (Q2517920)

In order to approximate \(n\)-dimensional Sinai billiard by a smooth Hamiltonian system the authors study the dynamics of a particle in a family of steep potentials which limit to the discontinuous Sinai billiard case. While previous stability and instability results were mainly achieved in two-dimensional domains the authors aim at a result for arbitrarily high space dimensions. Indeed, they are able to show the existence of an elliptic periodic orbit for any space dimension \(n\) if the potential is sufficiently steep. By KAM theory this implies the existence of a nearby invariant set of positive Lebesgue measure. In particular, the existence of elliptic periodic orbits therefore excludes uniform hyperbolicity (like the limiting Sinai billiard) as well as uniform partial hyperbolicity of the system. The construction is performed in two steps. First a highly symmetric configuration of \(n+1\) spheres is given such that a family of periodic orbits can be found which have no periodic counterpart in the limit. The main part of the article treats the stability of this periodic orbits. Due to symmetry the Floquet multipliers can be determined by studying a single second order equation. It turns out that in a two-parameter plane there are wedge-like regions of linear stability. In the special case of power-law potentials it is even possible to estimate the position and size of these stability regions. Numerical simulations with symmetric and slightly assymetric potentials illustrate and confirm the theoretical results.