On the kinematic geometry of many-body systems (Q1284262)

The configuration space of a given \(n\)-body system in \(\mathbb{R}^3\), equipped with the Jacobi inner product, admits an SO(3)-equivariant isomorphism with the space \({\mathcal M}\) of real \(3\times n\) matrices, endowed with the standard metric \(\text{tr}(X^tX)\). From this isomorphism, the configuration space gets an additional \(O(n-1)\)-symmetry compatible with the SO(3)-action, corresponding to right matrix multiplication on \({\mathcal M}\). Clearly, this fact becomes extremely interesting only in the case \(n\geq 4\). The author analyses the \(\text{SO(3)} \times\text{O}(n-1)\)-orbit structure with methods of equivariant Riemannian geometry. For potential functions depending only on the pairwise distances \(r_{ij}\) among the \(n\) particles as the Newton and Coulomb potential, it should be usefull to see that the \(r_{ij}\) can be given by a very simple explicit formula. The \(r_{ij}\) are, up to a mass factor, the distance between the configuration, represented in the space \({\mathcal M}\) and in the subspace of \((i,j)\)-binary collisions.