No hyperbolic pants for the 4-body problem
Abstract
The -body problem with a potential has, in addition to translation and rotational symmetry, an effective scale symmetry which allows its zero energy flow to be reduced to a geodesic flow on complex projective -space, minus a hyperplane arrangement. When we get a geodesic flow on the two-sphere minus three points. If, in addition we assume that the three masses are equal, then it was proved in [1] that the corresponding metric is hyperbolic: its Gaussian curvature is negative except at two points. Does the negative curvature property persist for , that is, in the equal mass 4-body problem? Here we prove `no' by computing that the corresponding Riemannian metric in this case has positive sectional curvature at some two-planes. This `no' answer dashes hopes of naively extending hyperbolicity from to .
Cite
@article{arxiv.1502.00606,
title = {No hyperbolic pants for the 4-body problem},
author = {Connor Jackman and Richard Montgomery},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1502.00606},
year = {2015}
}
Comments
10 pages, 1 figure