Symmetric regularization, reduction and blow-up of the planar three-body problem (Q1955984)

The present paper is divided into eight sections. The first one is devoted to a historical picture of the three-body problem. Section 2 reviews the theory of symplectic reduction by an abelian group \(G\) for the cotangent bundle \(T^*X\) of some configuration space \(X\). The theory asserts that the reduced space is the manifold \(T^*(X/G)\), i.e., the cotangent bundle of the quotient space \(X/G\), but with a symplectic form different from the standard one. More precisely, the reduction depends on selecting a value \(\mu \) of the ``angular momentum'' and then the symplectic structure on \(T^*(X/G)\) depends linearly on \(\mu \) becoming the standard one only for \(\mu =0\). In Sections 3--5, this reduction theory is considered for the non-Abelian group \(G\) of orientation-preserving similarities acting on the phase space \(T^*\mathbb{C}^3\) of the configuration space \(X=\mathbb{C}^3\) of the planar three-body problem. In order to apply the above procedure, the group \(G\) is splitted into its three abelian parts: translations (Section 3), scalings (Section 4), and rotations (Section 5). Section 6 concerns the Levi-Civita regularization while the next section deals with blowing-up triple collisions. The last section is a detailed summary of this impressive work.