Invariant tori in Hamiltonian systems with high order proper degeneracy (Q625085)

The authors study the existence of quasi-periodic invariant tori in a nearly integrable Hamiltonian system of high order proper degeneracy, i.e., the integrable part of the Hamiltonian involves several time scales, and at each time scale the corresponding Hamiltonian depends on only part of the action variables. Hamiltonians of the above form arise frequently in problems of celestial mechanics, for instance, in perturbed Kepler problems like the restricted and nonrestricted 3-body problems and spatial lunar problems in which several bodies with very small masses are coupled with two massive bodies and the nearly integrable Hamiltonian systems naturally involve different time scales. The existence of quasi-periodic motions for properly degenerate Hamiltonians was first shown by Arnold. In order to prove the main theorem of the paper the authors derive a normal form for a particular Hamiltonian system by conducting finitely many steps of KAM iterations on relatively small domains so that the non-integrable perturbation is pushed into a sufficiently high order. In Section 2 they adopt a quasilinear KAM iterative scheme introduced by the second and third author [Math. Ann. 326, No. 4, 649--690 (2003; Zbl 1330.37058)], which involves solving a system of quasi-linear homological equations at each KAM step instead of linear ones. The main result is proved in Section 3 by performing a linear KAM scheme for infinite steps.