Volume 23, Nº 6 (2018)

The effects of quasi-periodicity on the splitting of invariant manifolds are examined. We have found that some harmonics that could be expected to be dominant in some ranges of the perturbation parameter actually are nondominant. It is proved that, under reasonable conditions, this is due to the arithmetic properties of the frequencies.

This paper addresses the problem of an inhomogeneous disk rolling on a horizontal plane. This problem is considered within the framework of a nonholonomic model in which there is no slipping and no spinning at the point of contact (the projection of the angular velocity of the disk onto the normal to the plane is zero). The configuration space of the system of interest contains singular submanifolds which correspond to the fall of the disk and in which the equations of motion have a singularity. Using the theory of normal hyperbolic manifolds, it is proved that the measure of trajectories leading to the fall of the disk is zero.

Solutions of the planar Kepler problem with fixed energy h determine geodesics of the corresponding Jacobi–Maupertuis metric. This is a Riemannian metric on ℝ² if h ⩾ 0 or on a disk D ⊂ ℝ² if h < 0. The metric is singular at the origin (the collision singularity) and also on the boundary of the disk when h < 0. The Kepler problem and the corresponding metric are invariant under rotations of the plane and it is natural to wonder whether the metric can be realized as a surface of revolution in ℝ³ or some other simple space. In this note, we use elementary methods to study the geometry of the Kepler metric and the embedding problem. Embeddings of the metrics with h ⩾ 0 as surfaces of revolution in ℝ³ are constructed explicitly but no such embedding exists for h < 0 due to a problem near the boundary of the disk. We prove a theorem showing that the same problem occurs for every analytic central force potential. Returning to the Kepler metric, we rule out embeddings in the three-sphere or hyperbolic space, but succeed in constructing an embedding in four-dimensional Minkowski spacetime. Indeed, there are many such embeddings.

We construct a symplectic realization and a bi-Hamiltonian formulation of a 3-dimensional system whose solution are the Jacobi elliptic functions. We generalize this system and the related Poisson brackets to higher dimensions. These more general systems are parametrized by lines in projective space. For these rank 2 Poisson brackets the Jacobi identity is satisfied only when the Plücker relations hold. Two of these Poisson brackets are compatible if and only if the corresponding lines in projective space intersect. We present several examples of such systems.

The goal of this paper is to apply Lagrangian Descriptors (LDs), a technique based on Dynamical Systems Theory (DST) to reveal the phase space structures present in the well-known Arnold’s cat map. This discrete dynamical system, which represents a classical example of an Anosov diffeomorphism that is strongly mixing, will provide us with a benchmark model to test the performance of LDs and their capability to detect fixed points, periodic orbits and their stable and unstable manifolds present in chaotic maps. In this work we show, both from a theoretical and a numerical perspective, how LDs reveal the invariant manifolds of the periodic orbits of the cat map. The application of this methodology in this setting clearly illustrates the chaotic behavior of the cat map and highlights some technical numerical difficulties that arise in the identification of its phase space structures.

The application of intersection theory to construction of n-point finite-difference equations associated with classical integrable systems is discussed. As an example, we present a few new discretizations of motion of the Euler top sharing the integrals of motion with the continuous time system and the Poisson bracket up to the integer scaling factor.