Non-minimality and instability of brake orbits for natural Lagrangians on Riemannian manifolds

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Asselle, Luca, Hu, Xijun, Portaluri, Alessandro, Wu, Li
Format: Preprint
Published: 2023
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_version_ 1866912940537413632
author Asselle, Luca
Hu, Xijun
Portaluri, Alessandro
Wu, Li
author_facet Asselle, Luca
Hu, Xijun
Portaluri, Alessandro
Wu, Li
contents We investigate minimality and stability of periodic brake orbits in natural Lagrangian systems on smooth Riemannian manifolds. We prove that every non-constant periodic brake orbit is not a minimizer of the fixed-time action, for any conormal boundary condition. Under an orbit-cylinder hypothesis, its Morse index strictly increases in the free-time setting. As a consequence, strongly nondegenerate brake orbits fail to be linearly stable under a dimensional condition; in dimension at least three, nondegenerate mountain-pass brake orbits are spectrally unstable when the monodromy is semisimple. The key ingredient is a local index contribution at each brake instant. Using Seifert collar coordinates near the Hill boundary, we reduce the normal dynamics to a one-dimensional model, exhibiting a degeneracy inherent to brake symmetry. We illustrate the results by explicit Morse index computations for the planar anisotropic oscillator, the planar pendulum, and the planar Kepler problem; in the Kepler case, the ejection--collision orbit is treated via cotangent-lift Levi--Civita--Lissajous regularization.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2307_06105
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Non-minimality and instability of brake orbits for natural Lagrangians on Riemannian manifolds
Asselle, Luca
Hu, Xijun
Portaluri, Alessandro
Wu, Li
Dynamical Systems
Symplectic Geometry
37J45, 58E05, 70H03, 70H07, 37J25
We investigate minimality and stability of periodic brake orbits in natural Lagrangian systems on smooth Riemannian manifolds. We prove that every non-constant periodic brake orbit is not a minimizer of the fixed-time action, for any conormal boundary condition. Under an orbit-cylinder hypothesis, its Morse index strictly increases in the free-time setting. As a consequence, strongly nondegenerate brake orbits fail to be linearly stable under a dimensional condition; in dimension at least three, nondegenerate mountain-pass brake orbits are spectrally unstable when the monodromy is semisimple. The key ingredient is a local index contribution at each brake instant. Using Seifert collar coordinates near the Hill boundary, we reduce the normal dynamics to a one-dimensional model, exhibiting a degeneracy inherent to brake symmetry. We illustrate the results by explicit Morse index computations for the planar anisotropic oscillator, the planar pendulum, and the planar Kepler problem; in the Kepler case, the ejection--collision orbit is treated via cotangent-lift Levi--Civita--Lissajous regularization.
title Non-minimality and instability of brake orbits for natural Lagrangians on Riemannian manifolds
topic Dynamical Systems
Symplectic Geometry
37J45, 58E05, 70H03, 70H07, 37J25
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.06105