English

Relative periodic solutions in spatial Kepler problem with symmetric perturbation

Dynamical Systems 2026-01-28 v2 Analysis of PDEs

Abstract

The spatial Kepler problem with a perturbation satisfying the rotational symmetry w.r.t. the zz-axis and the reflection symmetry w.r.t. the (x,y)(x, y)-plane, can be reduced to an Hamiltonian system with 2 degrees of freedom after fixing the angular momentum. For small enough perturbations, we show that for certain choices of energy and angular momentum, the corresponding energy surface is compact and diffeomorphic to S3\mathbb{S}^3, and on each compact energy surface there is a unique zz-symmetric brake orbit, which forms a Hopf link with a planar relative periodic orbit. Moreover under some additional technical assumptions, by applying recent results from symplectic dynamics (\cite{CHHL23}) and Franks' Theorem, we prove there are infinitely many relative periodic orbits on each compact energy surface. These results can be applied to the motion of a satellite around a uniformly mass-distributed ellipsoid and the nn-pyramidal problem, where one point mass moves along the zz-axis and nn other equal point masses form a regular nn-gon perpendicular to the zz-axis.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2508.15209,
  title  = {Relative periodic solutions in spatial Kepler problem with symmetric perturbation},
  author = {Xijun Hu and Zhiwen Qiao and Guowei Yu},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2508.15209},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

27 pages; accecpted by Nonlinearity

R2 v1 2026-07-01T04:59:24.764Z