Homoclinic and heteroclinic orbits of reversible vectorfields under perturbation

Abstract

SynopsisAveraging techniques on Hamiltonian dynamical systems can often be used to establish the existence of hyperbolic periodic orbits. In equilibrium situations, it is then often difficult to show that there are homoclinic/heteroclinic connections between these hyperbolic orbits in the original unaveraged system. This existence problem is solved in this paper for a class of Hamiltonian systems admitting a sufficient number of symmetries (including reversing symmetries). Under isoenergetic reduction, the problem is reduced to one involving reversible vector fields under time-dependent perturbations admitting the same reversing symmetries. Applications are made to the one-parameter Hénon-Heiles family. The paper concludes with remarks on the problem of showing transversality of these homoclinic/heteroclinic orbits.