A dihedral Bott-type iteration formula and stability of symmetric periodic orbits (Q2296689)

The paper studies Morse theoretic properties of orbits of Hamiltonian systems on Euclidean space invariant under the action of a compact Lie group (in fact finite subgroups of the orthogonal group). There are four main results. The first two theorems are Bott-type index formulas for Hamiltonian and Lagrangian systems respectively invariant under an action of the dyhedral group. The first theorem on Hamiltonian systems contains several index indentities for the \textit{geometric index} of an orbit. This index is defined in Definition 1.3 using a Maslov-type index from [\textit{S. E. Cappell} et al., Commun. Pure Appl. Math. 47, No. 2, 121--186 (1994; Zbl 0805.58022)]. The second theorem gives similar formulas for the case of Lagrangian systems. The theory is then applied to \textit{figure eight solutions} of the \textit{planar} \(3\)\textit{-body problem} [\textit{A. Chenciner}, Contemp. Math. 292, 71--90 (2002; Zbl 1026.70017); \textit{A. Chenciner} and \textit{R. Montgomery}, Ann. Math. (2) 152, No. 3, 881--901 (2000; Zbl 0987.70009); \textit{A. Chenciner}, in: Topology methods, variational methods, and their applications. Proceedings of the ICM 2002 satellite conference on nonlinear functional analysis, Taiyuan, China, August 14--18, 2002. River Edge, NJ: World Scientific. 77--88 (2003; Zbl 1205.37076)]. Theorem 3 computes the Morse indices of the solution on the space of equivariant orbits. The last result (Theorem 4) is a criterion for the strong stability of an orbit of a Lagrangian system (see Definition 1.7). In Corollary 2 this is translated into a criterion for the hyperbolicity of the orbit. Finally Corollary 3 gives a new proof of a result from [\textit{D. C. Offin}, Differ. Integral Equ. 5, No. 3, 615--629 (1992; Zbl 0761.58040)].