A functional analysis approach to Arnold diffusion (Q697656)

This paper is devoted to the study of instabilities in Hamiltonian near-integrable systems in the particular case of the quasi-periodically forced pendulum. The system is given by the Hamiltonian function \[ \mathcal H_\mu =\omega \cdot I +\frac{p^2}{2}+(\cos q -1)+\mu f(\varphi, q), \] where \((\varphi, q)\in \mathbb T^n \times {\mathbb T}^1\) are the angle variables, \((I,p)\in {\mathbb T}^n \times {\mathbb T}^1\) are the action variables, \(\mu\geq 0\) is a small real parameter, and \(\omega\in \mathbb T^n\) is the frequency vector. The corresponding system can be written as \[ -\ddot q +\sin q =\mu\sin q\;f(\omega t+A, q), \] where \(A\in \mathbb R^n\) is a constant. The main result of the paper is the following theorem: Suppose that the frequency vector \(\omega\) is Diophantine, and the Poincaré-Melnikov function \[ M(A) = \int_{\mathbb R} [f(\omega t +A, 0)-f(\omega t +A ,q_0(t))]dt, \] with \(q_0(t)=4\arctan(\exp t)\) being the unperturbed separatrix of the pendulum, posesses a proper minimum or maximum. Then, for \(\mu\) small enough, there are orbits whose action variables \(I\) undergo a drift of order one under the time interval O\(((1/\mu)\log (1/\mu))\). It was known before that in initially unstable systems, of which the above system is an example, instability can develop over a polynomial time. The above theorem gives the best known estimate on the speed of diffusion. The authors give a detailed proof for the case when \(f\) is independent of \(q\), and explain the modifications needed for the general case.