Paper detail

Homoclinic connections with many loops near a $0^2 iw$ resonant fixed point for Hamiltonian systems

In this paper we study the dynamics near the equilibrium point of a family of Hamiltonian systems in the neighborhood of a $0^2 iw$ resonance. The existence of a family of periodic orbits surrounding the equilibrium is well-known and we show here the existence of homoclinic connections with several loops for every periodic orbit close to the origin, except the origin itself. To prove this result, we first show a Hamiltonian normal form theorem inspired by the Elphick-Tirapegui-Brachet-Coullet-Iooss normal form. We then use a local Hamiltonian normalization relying on a result of Moser. We obtain the result of existence of homoclinic orbits by geometrical arguments based on the low dimension and with the aid of a KAM theorem which allows to confine the loops. The same problem was studied before for reversible non Hamiltonian vectorfields, and the splitting of the homoclinic orbits lead to exponentially small terms which prevent the existence of homoclinic connections to exponentially small periodic orbits. The same phenomenon occurs here but we get round this difficulty thanks to geometric arguments specific to Hamiltonian systems and by studying homoclinic orbits with many loops.