The parabolic trajectories of celestial mechanics as minimal phase transitions (Q2869753)

The author develops a variational approach to the existence and characterization of parabolic trajectories as minimal phase transitions for \((-\alpha )\)-homogeneous potentials where \(\alpha \in (0, 2)\). An important example is the problem of \(N\) bodies in \(\mathbb{R}^d\) where the potential is \(U(x)=\sum _{j<1}^NU_{i,j}(x_i-x_j)\) for \(x=(x_1,...,x_N)\in \mathbb{R}^{dN}\) and \(U_{i,j}(x)=\frac{m_im_j}{|x|^{\alpha }}\). The Kepler case is obtained for \(\alpha =1\).