The system of one-dimensional balls in an external field. II (Q921994)

In the first part [see the author, ibid. 126, No.3, 507-533 (1990; Zbl 0695.70007)] we have introduced a Hamiltonian system with arbitrary number of degrees of freedom (dimension) for which we can establish the nonvanishing of at least one Lyapunov exponent almost everywhere. It is a system of n particles in a line which fall down with constant acceleration towards a hard floor and collide elastically with each other. This system should be compared with Sinai's gas of hard spheres, for which also the nonvanishing of only few exponents was established in the general case of arbitrary number of spheres. Although there is little doubt that the system has all exponents different from zero one encounters serious technical difficulties. What one needs to prove to get nonvanishing of all exponents is first that every ball is connected by a chain of collisions with every other ball and secondly that certain conspiracies (too technical to formulate here) can occur only on orbits of total measure zero. For our system the former is taken care of automatically (all collisions that can occur do occur on all orbits) but we still cannot prove the latter. In the present paper we modify the potential of the external field from \(V(q)=q\) to V(q) such that \(f(q)=V'(q)>0\) and \(f'(q)<0\). These requirements allow in particular for the standard gravitational potential \(V(q)=1/q\). In such a system nonvanishing of all Lyapunov exponents can be established fairly easily under the usual assumption that the masses of the particles decrease as we go up.