Perturbations of geodesic flows by recurrent dynamics (Q520741)

The main idea of this paper is that one can obtain Hamiltonian instability by relying almost exclusively on homoclinic excursions, by carefully choosing the times to jump onto the homoclinics. To apply this, it is not necessary to assume much on the form of the perturbations. As it turns out, by jumping onto the homoclinics at about the same place one can obtain effects similar to averaging. The gain of energy is obtained by timing the place of the jumps and by taking advantage of the fact that there are several homoclinics available for jumping. To illustrate this approach, the authors consider a model consisting of a geodesics flow perturbed by a time-dependent potential. It is important to remark that the metric defining the geodesic flow can be Riemannian but also Lorentz or Finsler.