The Singularity of Poincaré revisited

S. Ferraz Mello
Observatorio Nacional, Brasil


The classical averaging theories founded on Jacobian canonical transformations (viz. Lindstedt, Von Zeipel, Delaunay) cannot be extended to allow the study of the neighbourhood of a resonance, except in the case of only one degree of freedom (e.g. Garfinkel's Ideal Resonance Problem). When long-period variables are also considered leading to increase the number of degrees of freedom, one singularity appear on the right-hand side of the perturbation equations, as shown by Poincaré. Some of the attempts to circumvent this problem in the past are discussed and compared to modern methods founded on Lie series.

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