World Scientific Monograph Series In Mathematics – serie

This volume is an outgrowth of the Third International Symposium on Hamiltonian Systems and Celestial Mechanics. The main topics are Arnold diffusion, central configurations, singularities in few-body problems, billiards, area-preserving maps, and geometrical mechanics. All papers in the volume went through the refereeing process typical of a mathematical research journal.

Fred Almgren exploited the excess method for proving regularity theorems in the calculus of variations. His techniques yielded Hölder continuous differentiability except for a small closed singular set. In the sixties and seventies Almgren refined and generalized his methods. Between 1974 and 1984 he wrote a 1,700-page proof that was his most ambitious development of his ground-breaking ideas. Originally, this monograph was available only as a three-volume work of limited circulation. The entire text is faithfully reproduced here.This book gives a complete proof of the interior regularity of an area-minimizing rectifiable current up to Hausdorff codimension 2. The argument uses the theory of Q-valued functions, which is developed in detail. For example, this work shows how first variation estimates from squash and squeeze deformations yield a monotonicity theorem for the normalized frequency of oscillation of a Q-valued function that minimizes a generalized Dirichlet integral. The principal features of the book include an extension theorem analogous to Kirszbraun's theorem and theorems on the approximation in mass of nearly flat mass-minimizing rectifiable currents by graphs and images of Lipschitz Q-valued functions.

The aim of this book is to explain, analyze and compute the kinds of motions that appear in an extended vicinity of the geometrically defined equilateral points of the Earth-Moon system, as a source of possible nominal orbits for future space missions. The methodology developed here is not specific to astrodynamics problems. The techniques are developed in such a way that they can be used to study problems that can be modeled by dynamical systems.

This book studies several problems related to the analysis of planned or possible spacecraft missions. It is divided into four chapters. The first chapter is devoted to the computation of quasiperiodic solutions for the motion of a spacecraft near the equilateral points of the Earth-Moon system. The second chapter gives a complete description of the orbits near the collinear point, L1, between the Earth and the Sun in the restricted three-body problem (RTBP) model. In the third chapter, methods are developed to compute the nominal orbit and to design and test the control strategy for the quasiperiodic halo orbits. In the last chapter, the transfer from the Earth to a halo orbit is studied.

It is well known that the restricted three-body problem has triangular equilibrium points. These points are linearly stable for values of the mass parameter, μ, below Routh's critical value, μ1. It is also known that in the spatial case they are nonlinearly stable, not for all the initial conditions in a neighborhood of the equilibrium points L4, L5 but for a set of relatively large measures. This follows from the celebrated Kolmogorov-Arnold-Moser theorem. In fact there are neighborhoods of computable size for which one obtains “practical stability” in the sense that the massless particle remains close to the equilibrium point for a big time interval (some millions of years, for example).According to the literature, what has been done in the problem follows two approaches: (a) numerical simulations of more or less accurate models of the real solar system; (b) study of periodic or quasi-periodic orbits of some much simpler problem.The concrete questions that are studied in this volume are: (a) Is there some orbit of the real solar system which looks like the periodic orbits of the second approach? (That is, are there orbits performing revolutions around L4 covering eventually a thick strip? Furthermore, it would be good if those orbits turn out to be quasi-periodic. However, there is no guarantee that such orbits exist or will be quasi-periodic). (b) If the orbit of (a) exists and two particles (spacecraft) are put close to it, how do the mutual distance and orientation change with time?As a final conclusion of the work, there is evidence that orbits moving in a somewhat big annulus around L4 and L5 exist, that these orbits have small components out of the plane of the Earth-Moon system, and that they are at most mildly unstable.

In this book the problem of station keeping is studied for orbits near libration points in the solar system. The main focus is on orbits near halo ones in the (Earth+Moon)-Sun system. Taking as starting point the restricted three-body problem, the motion in the full solar system is considered as a perturbation of this simplified model. All the study is done with enough generality to allow easy application to other primary-secondary systems as a simple extension of the analytical and numerical computations.

In this book the problem of station keeping is studied for orbits near libration points in the solar system. The main focus is on orbits near halo ones in the (Earth+Moon)-Sun system. Taking as starting point the restricted three-body problem, the motion in the full solar system is considered as a perturbation of this simplified model. All the study is done with enough generality to allow easy application to other primary-secondary systems as a simple extension of the analytical and numerical computations.

This volume marks the twentieth anniversary of the Bialowieza series of meetings on Differential Geometric Methods in Physics; the anniversary meeting was held during July 1-7, 2001. The Bialowieza meetings, held every year during the first week of July, have now grown into an annual pilgrimage for an international group of physicists and mathematicians. The topics discussed at the meetings, while within the broad area of differential geometric methods in physics, have focused around quantization, coherent states, infinite dimensional systems, symplectic geometry, spectral theory and harmonic analysis. The present volume brings together a set of specially invited papers from leading experts in the various fields, who have contributed to these meetings and whose work represents a cross-section of the topics discussed. Consequently, rather than a proceedings volume, this book embodies the spirit of the Bialowieza workshops and reflects their scientific tenor, as a tribute to the completion of two decades of a shared scientific experience.This book will be of interest to researchers and graduate students working in the area of differential geometric methods in physics, as it gives interesting glimpses into the present state of the art from different points of view.