Spectral stability, spectral flow and circular relative equilibria for the Newtonian n-body problem

DOI10.1016/J.JDE.2022.07.032MaRDI QIDQ2172471zbMATH OpenOpenAlexFDO

Authors Luca Asselle, Alessandro Portaluri, Li Wu

Publication date 15 September 2022

Published in Journal of Differential Equations (Search for Journal in Brave)

Full work available at URL https://arxiv.org/abs/2105.15009

zbMATH Keywords

\(n\)-body problemcentral configurationsspectral (linear) instabilityspectral flow

Mathematics Subject Classification ID

Stability problems for finite-dimensional Hamiltonian and Lagrangian systems (37J25) (n)-body problems (70F10)

Abstract: For the Newtonian (gravitational) $n$-body problem in the Euclidean $d$-dimensional space, $dge2$, the simplest possible periodic solutions are provided by circular relative equilibria, (RE) for short, namely solutions in which each body rigidly rotates about the center of mass and the configuration of the whole system is constant in time and central (or, more generally, balanced) configuration. For $dle3$, the only possible (RE) are planar, but in dimension four it is possible to get truly four dimensional (RE). A classical problem in celestial mechanics aims at relating the (in-)stability properties of a (RE) to the index properties of the central (or, more generally, balanced) configuration generating it. In this paper, we provide sufficient conditions that imply the spectral instability of planar and non-planar (RE) in $mathbb{R}^4$ generated by a central configuration, thus answering some of the questions raised in cite[Page 63]{Moe14}. As a corollary, we retrieve a classical result of Hu and Sun cite{HS09} on the linear instability of planar (RE) whose generating central configuration is non-degenerate and has odd Morse index, and fix a gap in the statement of cite[Theorem 1]{BJP14} about the spectral instability of planar (RE) whose (possibly degenerate) generating central configuration has odd Morse index. The key ingredients are a new formula of independent interest that allows to compute the spectral flow of a path of symmetric matrices having degenerate starting point, and a symplectic decomposition of the phase space of the linearized Hamiltonian system along a given (RE) which is inspired by Meyer and Schmidt's planar decomposition cite{MS05} and which allows us to rule out the uninteresting part of the dynamics corresponding to the translational and (partially) to the rotational symmetry of the problem.

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Cites work

• Bifurcations of balanced configurations for the Newtonian \(n\)-body problem in \(\mathbb{R}^4\)
• Computation of the Maslov index and the spectral flow via partial signatures.
• Elliptic relative equilibria in the \(N\)-body problem
• Linear instability of relative equilibria for \(n\)-body problems in the plane
• Morse index and linear stability of the Lagrangian circular orbit in a three-body-type problem via index theory
• Morse index and stability of the planar \(N\)-vortex problem
• Morse theory for Hamiltonian systems
• Relative equilibria of the 3-body problem in \(\mathbb{R}^4\)
• Stability of relative equilibria and Morse index of central configurations
• The \(n\)-body problem and mutual distances
• The Spectral Flow and the Maslov Index

Cited in

(5)

• Linear instability of relative equilibria for \(n\)-body problems in the plane
• Spectral stability of relative equilibria in the N+1 body problem
• Spectral instability of relative equilibria in the planarn-body problem
• Linear stability of an elliptic relative equilibrium in the spatial n-body problem via index theory
• Functional determinants for the second variation

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