English

Chaos in a Relativistic 3-body Self-Gravitating System

General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology 2009-11-07 v3 Astrophysics Atomic Physics

Abstract

We consider the 3-body problem in relativistic lineal gravity and obtain an exact expression for its Hamiltonian and equations of motion. While general-relativistic effects yield more tightly-bound orbits of higher frequency compared to their non-relativistic counterparts, as energy increases we find in the equal-mass case no evidence for either global chaos or a breakdown from regular to chaotic motion, despite the high degree of non-linearity in the system. We find numerical evidence for a countably infinite class of non-chaotic orbits, yielding a fractal structure in the outer regions of the Poincare plot.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.gr-qc/0208044,
  title  = {Chaos in a Relativistic 3-body Self-Gravitating System},
  author = {F. J. Burnell and R. B. Mann and T. Ohta},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:gr-qc/0208044},
  year   = {2009}
}

Comments

9 pages, LaTex, 3 figures, final version to appear in Phys. Rev. Lett