Classification and stability of relative equilibria for the two-body problem in the hyperbolic space of dimension 2 (Q2634225)

This paper considers a generalization of the two-body problems to the complete, simply connected hyperbolic two-dimensional space \(\mathcal{H}^2\). In particular, the authors focus on the study of relative equilibria in this setting: The two-body problem in \(\mathcal{H}^2\) does not reduced to the Kepler problem, and is actually non-integrable. The non-integrability is associated with the absence of the center-of-mass integral. That, in turn, arises because the subgroup of orientation-preserving isometries representing translations is \(\mathbb R^2\) in the Euclidean case, whereas it is \(\mathcal{H}^2\) in hyperbolic space. The latter group is non-abelian. As a consequence, the symplectic reduction of the phase space by this subgroup has dimension 6 in hyperbolic space \(\mathcal{H}^2\) compared with 4 dimensions in the Euclidean case. The authors formulate the two-body problem in \(\mathcal{H}^2\) on the space \(Q=(\mathcal{H}^z\times\mathcal{H}^2)-\Delta\) (where \(\Delta\) is the set of collision configurations) as follows. The Lagrangian \(L: TQ\to\mathbb R\) is \[ L={1\over 2}(m_1v^2_1+ m_2 v^2_2)- V(d), \] where \(m_i\) and \(v^2_i\) are, respectively, the mass and the squared hyperbolic norm of the velocity of the \(i\)th particle. The positive real number \(d\) is the hyperbolic distance between \(m_1\) and \(m_2\). The potential function \(V:\mathbb R^+\to \mathbb R\) is given by \[ V(d)= -km_1m_2\,\mathrm{coth}(d), \] where \(k\) is a positive constant. This potential is deemed the correct generalization of the Euclidean potential to \(\mathcal{H}^2\). The authors classify all relative equilibria of the problem and assess their stability. The relative equilibria fall into two classes: hyperbolic (all unstable) and elliptic (stable only if the distance between the masses is relatively small). The stability analysis is based on the reduced energy-momentum method described by Simo and others.