Versal normal form at the Lagrange equilibrium \(L_ 4\) (Q1819954)

One of the by now standard techniques for the study of periodic orbits near equilibria of Hamiltonian systems is the order by order transformation to normal form. The planar restricted problem of three bodies near the Lagrange equilibrium \(L_ 4\) is an example where the first step in the procedure, i.e. the normalization of the quadratic part of the Hamiltonian, already causes difficulties. Indeed, near a critical value \(\delta_ 0\) of the mass ratio of the primaries, known as Routh's critical ratio, the theory gives rise to three distinct normal forms which do not continuously pass into one another as the parameter \(\delta\) crosses the value \(\delta_ 0\). The authors succeed in overcoming this problem by introducing a new kind of normal form, which is inspired on the theory of versal deformations of linear Hamiltonian systems [see e.g.: the third author, ibid. 51, 359-407 (1984; Zbl 0488.34034)]. Denoting by \(A(\delta)\in sp(4,{\mathbb{R}})\) the matrix of the linearized Hamiltonian vector field, the authors first define a suitable versal transformation V(\(\delta)\) of \(A(\delta_ 0)\). The symplectic conjugacy by which A(\(\delta)\) can be imbedded into the family V(\(\delta)\) is made unique by restriction to some closed subgroup of \(Sp(4,{\mathbb{R}}).\) The authors further provide a full construction of this conjugacy, through some intermediate steps in which the requirement that the action be symplectic is temporally omitted. They finally obtain the first three terms of the Taylor expansion about \(\delta =\delta_ 0\) of the symplectic conjugacy by using the algebraic manipulator VAXIMA and also by applying the method of Lie series.