We consider the class of Beltrami fields (eigenfields of the curl operator) on three-dimensional Riemannian solid tori: such vector fields arise as steady incompressible inviscid fluids and plasmas. Using techniques from contact geometry, we construct an integer-valued index for detecting closed orbits in the flow which are topologically inessential (they have winding number zero with respect to the solid torus). This index is independent of the Riemannian structure, and is computable entirely from a C^1 approximation to the vector field on any meridional disc of the solid torus.
Motivated by Poincaré's orbits going to infinity in the (restricted) three-body (see [26] and [6]), we investigate the generic existence of heteroclinic-like orbits in a neighbourhood of the critical set of a $b$-contact form. This is done by using the singular counterpart [3] of Etnyre--Ghrist's contact/Beltrami correspondence [9], and genericity results concerning eigenfunctions of the Laplacian established by Uhlenbeck [29]. Specifically, we analyze the $b$-Beltrami vector fields on $b$-manifolds of dimension $3$ and prove that for a generic asymptotically exact $b$-metric they exhibit esca…
We prove that there exist Beltrami fields in Euclidean space, with sharp decay at infinity, which have a prescribed set of invariant tori (possibly knotted or linked) that enclose an arbitrarily large number of hyperbolic periodic orbits. These hyperbolic orbits are cablings over the core curve of each torus. Moreover, the domain bounded by each invariant torus is covered by an almost full measure set of invariant tori. We show that an analogous result holds for high-frequency Beltrami fields on the flat 3-torus.
We characterise the boundary field line behaviour of Beltrami flows on compact, connected manifolds with vanishing first de Rham cohomology group. Namely we show that except for an at most nowhere dense subset of the boundary, on which the Beltrami field may vanish, all other field lines at the boundary are smoothly embedded $1$-manifolds diffeomorphic to $\mathbb{R}$, which approach the zero set as time goes to $\pm \infty$. We then drop the assumptions of compactness and vanishing de Rham cohomology and prove that for almost every point on the given manifold, the field line passing through t…
It was discovered by Gordon in 1977 that Keplerian ellipses in the plane are minimizers of the Lagrangian action and spectrally stable as periodic points of the associated Hamiltonian flow. The aim of this paper is to give a homotopy theoretical proof of these results through a self-contained, explicit and simple computation of the Conley-Zehnder index. The techniques developed in this paper can be used to investigate the higher dimensional case of Keplerian ellipses, where the classical variational proof no longer applies.
It is well known that a planar central configuration of the $n$-body problem gives rise to solutions where each particle moves on a specific Keplerian orbit while the totality of the particles move on a homographic motion. When the eccentricity $e$ of the Keplerian orbit belongs in $[0,1)$, following Meyer and Schmidt, we call such solutions elliptic relative equilibria (shortly, ERE). In order to study the linear stability of ERE in the near-collision case, namely when $1-e$ is small enough, we introduce the collision index for planar central configurations. The collision index is a Maslov-ty…
Heteroclinic orbits for one-parameter families of nonautonomous vectorfields appear in a very natural way in many physical applications. Inspired by some recent bifurcation results for homoclinic trajectories of nonautonomous vectorfield, we define a new $\mathbf Z_2$-index and we construct a index theory for heteroclinic orbits of nonautonomous vectorfield. We prove an index theorem, by showing that, under some standard transversality assumptions, the $\mathbf Z_2$-index is equal to the parity, a homotopy invariant for paths of Fredholm operators of index 0. As a direct consequence of the ind…
In this paper, we define mean index for non-periodic orbits in Hamiltonian systems and study its properties. In general, the mean index is an interval in R which is uniformly continuous on the systems. We show that the index interval is a point for a quasi-periodic orbit. The mean index can be considered as a generalization of rotation number which defined by Johnson and Moser in the study of almost periodic Schrodinger operators. Motivated by their works, we study the relation of Fredholm property of the linear operator and the mean index at the end of the paper.
In this paper, we prove Morse index theorem of Lagrangian system with any self-adjoint boundary conditions. Based on it, we give some nontrivial estimation on the difference of Morse indices. As an application, we get a new criterion for the stability problem of brake periodic orbit.
Index theory revealed its outstanding role in the study of periodic orbits of Hamiltonian systems and the dynamical consequences of this theory are enormous. Although the index theory in the periodic case is well-established, very few results are known in the case of homoclinic orbits of Hamiltonian systems. Moreover, to the authors' knowledge, no results have been yet proved in the case of heteroclinic and halfclinic (i.e. parametrised by a half-line) orbits. Motivated by the importance played by these motions in understanding several challenging problems in Classical Mechanics, we develop a …
Inspired by the classical Poincaré criterion about the instability of orientation preserving minimizing closed geodesics on surfaces, we investigate the relation intertwining the instability and the variational properties of periodic solutions of a non-autonomous Lagrangian on a finite dimensional Riemannian manifold. We establish a general criterion for a priori detecting the linear instability of a periodic orbit on a Riemannian manifold for a (maybe not Legendre convex) non-autonomous Lagrangian simply by looking at the parity of the spectral index, which is the right substitute of the Mors…
It is well known that the linear stability of the Lagrangian elliptic solutions in the classical planar three-body problem depends on a mass parameter $β$ and on the eccentricity $e$ of the orbit. We consider only the circular case ($e = 0$) but under the action of a broader family of singular potentials: $α$-homogeneous potentials, for $α\in (0,2)$, and the logarithmic one. It turns out indeed that the Lagrangian circular orbit persists also in this more general setting. We discover a region of linear stability expressed in terms of the homogeneity parameter $α$ and the mass parameter $β$, th…
We give a necessary and sufficient condition for strong stability of low dimensional Hamiltonian systems, in terms of the iterates of a closed orbit and the Conley-Zehnder index. Applications to Mathieu equation and stable harmonic oscillations for forced pendulum type equations are considered as applications of the main result.
The main theme of this paper is the connection between the existence of infinitely many periodic orbits for a Hamiltonian system and the behavior of its action or index spectrum under iterations. We use the action and index spectra to show that any Hamiltonian diffeomorphism of a closed, rational manifold with zero first Chern class has infinitely many periodic orbits and that, for a general rational manifold, the number of geometrically distinct periodic orbits is bounded from below by the ratio of the minimal Chern number and half of the dimension. These generalizations of the Conley conject…
In this paper, we first establish the Bott-type iteration formulas and some abstract precise iteration formulas of the Maslov-type index theory associated with a Lagrangian subspace for symplectic paths. As an application, we prove that there exist at least $[\frac{n}{2}]+1$ geometrically distinct brake orbits on every $C^2$ compact convex symmetric hypersurface $Σ$ in $\mathbb{R}^{2n}$ satisfying the reversible condition $NΣ=Σ$, furthermore, if all brake orbits on this hypersurface are nondegenerate, then there are at least $n$ geometrically distinct brake orbits on it. As a consequence, we s…
We define a notion of equivariant non-degeneracy of $G$-maps to introduce the class of equivariantly non-degenerate flows on smooth compact manifolds with compact Lie group action. We prove genericity of this class and use this result to construct an equivariant version of the Fuller index, which detects group orbits of periodic orbits of the flow, distinguished by their isotropy.
We study the problem of existence of orbits connecting stationary points for the nonlinear heat and strongly damped wave equations being at resonance at infinity. The main difficulty lies in the fact that the problems may have no solutions for general nonlinearity. To address this question we introduce geometrical assumptions for the nonlinear term and use them to prove index formulas expressing the Conley index of associated semiflows. We also prove that the geometrical assumptions are generalizations of the well known Landesman- Lazer and strong resonance conditions. Obtained index formulas …
We investigate the behavior of the Generalized Alignment Index of order $k$ (GALI$_k$) for regular orbits of multidimensional Hamiltonian systems. The GALI$_k$ is an efficient chaos indicator, which asymptotically attains positive values for regular motion when $2\leq k \leq N$, with $N$ being the dimension of the torus on which the motion occurs. By considering several regular orbits in the neighborhood of two typical simple, stable periodic orbits of the Fermi-Pasta-Ulam-Tsingou (FPUT) $β$ model for various values of the system's degrees of freedom, we show that the asymptotic GALI$_k$ value…
In this note we study two index questions. In the first we establish the relationship between the Morse indices of the free time action functional and the fixed time action functional. The second is related to Rabinowitz Floer homology. Our index computations are based on a correction term which is defined as follows: around a non-degenerate Hamiltonian orbit lying in a fixed energy level a well-known theorem says that one can find a whole cylinder of orbits parametrized by the energy. The correction term is determined by whether the periods of the orbits are increasing or decreasing as one mo…
Let $ϕ(x) = x^d + c$ be an integral polynomial of degree at least 2, and consider the sequence $(ϕ^n(0))_{n=0}^\infty$, which is the orbit of $0$ under iteration by $ϕ$. Let $D_{d,c}$ denote the set of positive integers $n$ for which $n \mid ϕ^n(0)$. We give a characterization of $D_{d,c}$ in terms of a directed graph and describe a number of its properties, including its cardinality and the primes contained therein. In particular, we study the question of which primes $p$ have the property that the orbit of $0$ is a single $p$-cycle modulo $p$. We show that the set of such primes is finite wh…
This paper is concerned with closed orbits of non-smooth vector fields on the plane. For a subclass of non-smooth vector fields we provide necessary and sufficient conditions for the existence of canard kind solutions. By means of a regularization we prove that the canard cycles are singular orbits of singular perturbation problems which are limit periodic sets of a sequence of limit cycles. Moreover, we generalize the Poincaré Index for non-smooth vector fields.
Let $f$ be an orientation and area preserving diffeomorphism of an oriented surface $M$ with an isolated degenerate fixed point $z_0$ with Lefschetz index one. Le Roux conjectured that $z_0$ is accumulated by periodic orbits. In this article, we will approach Le Roux's conjecture by proving that if $f$ is isotopic to the identity by an isotopy fixing $z_0$ and if the area of $M$ is finite, then $z_0$ is accumulated not only by periodic points, but also by periodic orbits in the measure sense. More precisely, the Dirac measure at $z_0$ is the limit in weak-star topology of a sequence of invaria…
This is an expository paper devoted to the Morse index of Chaperon's generating families of Hamiltonian diffeomorphisms. After reviewing the construction of such generating families, we present Bott's iteration theory in this setting: we study how the Morse index of a critical point corresponding to an iterated periodic orbit depends on the order of iteration of the orbit. We also investigate the precise dependence of the Morse index from the choice of the generating family associated to a given Hamiltonian diffeomorphism, which will allow to see the Morse index as a Maslov index for the linea…
The aim of the paper is three-fold. We begin by proving a formula, both global and local versions, relating the number of periodic orbits of an iterated map and the Lefschetz numbers, or indices in the local case, of its iterations. This formula is then used to express the mean Euler characteristic (MEC) of a contact manifold in terms of local, purely topological, invariants of closed Reeb orbits, without any non-degeneracy assumption on the orbits. Finally, turning to applications of the local MEC formula to dynamics, we use it to reprove a theorem asserting the existence of at least two clos…
In this paper, by the Masolv index theory, we will study the existence and multiplicity of homoclinic orbits for a class of asymptotically linear nonperiodic Hamiltonian systems with some twisted conditions on the Hamiltonian functions
We establish multiplicity results for geometrically distinct contractible closed Reeb orbits of non-degenerate contact forms on a broad class of prequantization bundles. The results hold under certain index requirements on the contact form and are sharp for unit cotangent bundles of CROSS's. In particular, we generalize and put in the symplectic-topological context a theorem of Duan, Liu, Long, and Wang for the standard contact sphere. We also prove similar results for non-hyperbolic contractible closed orbits and briefly touch upon the multiplicity problem for degenerate forms. On the combina…
We compute the fixed point index of non-degenerate central configurations for the $n$-body problem in the euclidean space of dimension $d$, relating it to the Morse index of the gravitational potential function $\bar U$ induced on the manifold of all maximal $O(d)$-orbits. In order to do so, we analyze the geometry of maximal orbit type manifolds, and compute Morse indices with respect to the mass-metric bilinear form on configuration spaces.
We study the combinatorial Reeb flow on the boundary of a four-dimensional convex polytope. We establish a correspondence between "combinatorial Reeb orbits" for a polytope, and ordinary Reeb orbits for a smoothing of the polytope, respecting action and Conley-Zehnder index. One can then use a computer to find all combinatorial Reeb orbits up to a given action and Conley-Zehnder index. We present some results of experiments testing Viterbo's conjecture and related conjectures. In particular, we have found some new examples of polytopes with systolic ratio $1$.
We investigate the detailed dynamics of multidimensional Hamiltonian systems by studying the evolution of volume elements formed by unit deviation vectors about their orbits. The behavior of these volumes is strongly influenced by the regular or chaotic nature of the motion, the number of deviation vectors, their linear (in)dependence and the spectrum of Lyapunov exponents. The different time evolution of these volumes can be used to identify rapidly and efficiently the nature of the dynamics, leading to the introduction of quantities that clearly distinguish between chaotic behavior and quasi…
We study the existence of multiple closed Reeb orbits on some contact manifolds by means of $S^1$-equivariant symplectic homology and the index iteration formula. It is proved that a certain class of contact manifolds which admit displaceable exact contact embeddings, a certain class of prequantization bundles, and Brieskorn spheres have multiple closed Reeb orbits.
In 1956, Bott in his celebrated paper on closed geodesics and Sturm intersection theory, proved an Index Iteration Formula for closed geodesics on Riemannian manifolds. Some years later, Ekeland improved this formula in the case of convex Hamiltonians and, in 1999, Long generalized the Bott iteration formula by putting in its natural symplectic context and constructing a very effective Index Theory. The literature about this formula is quite broad and the dynamical implications in the Hamiltonian world (e.g. existence, multiplicity, linear stability etc.) are enormous. Motivated by the recent …
