Keplerian orbits through the Conley-Zehnder index (Q2222385)

It was discovered by Gordon that Keplerian ellipses in the plane are minimizers of the Lagrangian action and spectrally stable as periodic points of the associated Hamiltonian flow. The aim of this paper is to give a direct proof of these results, already proved by Hu and Sun, in the planar elliptic three-body problem, ``through a self-contained and explicit computation of the Conley-Zehnder index through crossing forms in the Lagrangian setting''. Through the approach developed in this paper, it is possible to explicitly compute the index properties of closed Keplerian orbits for surfaces of constant Gaussian curvature among others. The authors conclude that Gordon's theorem breaks down if the dimension of the configuration space is bigger than 2, due to the fact that the loop space of the Euclidean \(n\)-dimensional space (for \(n\ge3\)) with the origin removed is path connected, contrary to what happens with their approach.