Linear instability of relative equilibria for n-body problems in the plane

DOI10.1016/J.JDE.2014.05.017MaRDI QIDQ2250573zbMATH OpenOpenAlexFDO

Authors Vivina Barutello, Riccardo D. Jadanza, Alessandro Portaluri

Publication date 7 July 2014

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

Full work available at URL https://arxiv.org/abs/1310.8318

zbMATH Keywords

relative equilibrialinear instabilitylogarithmic potentialspectral flow\(n\)-body problempartial signatures\(\alpha\)-homogeneous potential

Mathematics Subject Classification ID

Periodic solutions to ordinary differential equations (34C25) Lagrangian submanifolds; Maslov index (53D12) Abstract critical point theory (Morse theory, Lyusternik-Shnirel'man theory, etc.) in infinite-dimensional spaces (58E05) (n)-body problems (70F10)

Abstract: Following Smale, we study simple symmetric mechanical systems of $n$ point particles in the plane. In particular, we address the question of the linear and spectral stability properties of relative equilibria, which are special solutions of the equations of motion. Our main result is a sufficient condition to detect spectral (hence linear) instability. Namely, we prove that if the Morse index of an equilibrium point with even nullity is odd, then the associated relative equilibrium is spectrally unstable. The proof is based on some refined formulae for computing the spectral flow. As a notable application of our theorem, we examine two important classes of singular potentials: the $alpha$-homogeneous one, with $alphain(0,2)$, which includes the gravitational case, and the logarithmic one. We also establish, for the $alpha$-homogeneous potential, an inequality which is useful to test the spectral instability of the associated relative equilibrium.

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Cited in

(21)

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• Functional determinants for the second variation
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• Linear stability of relative equilibria with a dominant mass
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• Linear stability of the Lagrangian triangle solutions for quasihomogeneous potentials

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