Upper bounds on Arnold diffusion time via Mather theory (Q5932258)

The authors consider 5 different close-to-integrable Hamiltonians, all of which belong to the class of ``a priori unstable'' systems, i.e., their integrable parts have separatrices. Using the previously established results on preservation of invariant tori and the lower bounds for the splitting of separatrices, the authors obtain a lower bound for the time of the Arnold diffusion, which is proportional to a power of the size of the homoclinic splitting. The proof is based on a variational approach of Mather.