Symmetry and resonance in periodic FPU chains (Q5940394)

The goal of this paper is first of all to compute all lower order resonances in the eigenvalues of the Fermi-Pasta-Ulam (FPU) chain (periodic case). The author shows that independent of the number of particles in the chain there exists a near-identity transformation of the phase-space that brings the FPU chain into a very simple form, the so-called Birkhoff-Gustavson normal form. This ``Birkhoff-Gustavson'' normal form retains the symmetries of the original system and the author shows that as a result of this fact one can consider the periodic FPU Hamiltonian as a perturbation of a nondegenerate Liouville integrable Hamiltonian. Hence according to the KAM theorem, this proves the existence of many invariant tori on which the motion is quasiperiodic. Note that one can not expect this in lower-order resonant Hamiltonian systems.