Braids with the symmetries of Platonic polyhedra in the Coulomb (N+1)-body problem

摘要

We take into account the Coulomb (N + 1)-body problem with N = 12, 24, 60. One of the particles has positive charge Q > 0, and the remaining N have all the same negative charge q < 0. These particles move under the Coulomb force, and the positive charge is assumed to be at rest at the center of mass. Imposing a symmetry constraint, given by the symmetry group of the Platonic polyhedra, we were able to compute periodic orbits, using a shooting method and continuation with respect to the value Q of the positive charge.In the setting of the classical N-body problem, the existence of such orbits is proved with Calculus of Variation techniques, by minimizing the action functional. Here this approach does not seem to work, and numerical computations show that the orbits we compute are not minimizers of the action. (C) 2019 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.