A variational approach to frozen planet orbits in helium (Q6172267)

\textit{Frozen planet orbits} are periodic orbits in the helium atom which play an important role in its semiclassical treatment. In such an orbit both electrons lie on a line on the same side of the nucleus. The inner electron undergoes consecutive collisions with the nucleus while the outer electron (the actual ``frozen planet'') stays almost stationary at some distance. In this paper the authors present a variational approach to frozen planet orbits with instantaneous or mean interaction. One difficulty lies in the collisions of the inner electron with the nucleus, which need to be regularized in order to obtain a good functional analytic setup. In the case of mean interactions, the problem has delay and the application of the traditional Levi-Civita regularization becomes problematic. However, the authors address this issue by considering the novel nonlocal regularization discovered by \textit{V. Barutello} et al. [Adv. Math. 383, Article ID 107694, 64 p. (2021; Zbl 1482.70016)], which is defined in the loop space and therefore fits well with the problem under study. The two non-local approaches to the orbits of frozen planets, namely, the Lagrangian and the Hamiltonian, are presented. Within the variational setup, the authors transform the helium problem into one where two electrons interact only based on their mean values and use this to infer the existence of frozen planetary orbits. They study two functionals \({\mathcal B}_{av}\) and \({\mathcal B}_{in}\) arising from regularizing frozen planet configurations for the mean and instantaneous interaction, respectively, as well as their linear interpolation \({\mathcal B}_{r} = r {\mathcal B}_{in} + (1-r) {\mathcal B}_{av}\), \(r\in [0,1]\). The regularized action functional \({\mathcal B}_{r}\) has an intriguing structure. It consists of two terms. The first term can be interpreted as a kinetic energy, but for a nonlocal metric which depends on the whole loop. The second term can be interpreted as the negative of a nonlocal potential which is defined on the loop space of the configuration space. The authors explain how in this situation a nonlocal Legendre transform can be carried out which produces a nonlocal Hamiltonian. In particular, the following theorems are proven. \textbf{Theorem A.} For each \(r\in [0,1]\), critical points of the regularized action functional \({\mathcal B}_{r}\) correspond precisely to frozen planet orbits for the interpolated interaction. \textbf{Theorem B.} The regularized action functional \({\mathcal B}_{r}\) is invariant under an involution such that the critical points fixed by the involution are precisely the symmetric frozen planet orbits. \textbf{Theorem D.} After applying the nonlocal Legendre transform to the regularized action functional \({\mathcal B}_{r}\), the corresponding Hamiltonian delay equation reproduces frozen planet orbits.