Herman's global instability conjecture for the N-body problem

Consider the spatial NN-body problem with N3N\geq 3. Fix the center of mass at the origin. For each energy level ee, let He1(0)H_e^{-1}(0) denote the corresponding energy surface, and reparametrize the flow there by a smooth positive function so that collisions occur only at infinite time. The non-wandering set consists of points whose every neighborhood meets one of its nonzero-time iterates. Herman's global instability conjecture. For every ee, the non-wandering set of the Hamiltonian flow of HeH_e on He1(0)H_e^{-1}(0) is nowhere dense in He1(0)H_e^{-1}(0). This is one of Herman's conjectures concerning the oldest problem in dynamical systems. The source presents it as open and notes that even the completeness of the collision-regularized flow is unclear because of possible non-collision singularities.

Sources & referencesView supporting material

Primary source

Andrew Clarke, Jacques Fejoz and Marcel Guardia, “Why are inner planets not inclined?”, arXiv:2210.11311 (2022).

Additional references

2 papers in this index state this conjecture (2011–2022). The statement above is taken from the most recent of them; the others are arXiv:1109.2892.

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