On resonant energy sets for Hamiltonian systems with reflections

Krzysztof Frączek

Published 2024-05-23Version 1

We study two uncoupled oscillators, horizontal and vertical, residing in rectilinear polygons (with only vertical and horizontal sides) and impacting elastically from their boundary. The main purpose of the article is to analyze the occurrence of resonance in such systems, depending on the shape of the analytical potentials that determine the oscillators. We define resonant energy levels; roughly speaking, these are levels for which the resonance phenomenon occurs more often than rarely. We focus on unimodal analytic potentials with the minimum at zero. The most important result of the work describes the size of the set of resonance levels in the form of the following trichotomy: it is mostly empty or is one-element or is large, i.e. non-empty and open. We also indicate which classes of potentials each of the three possibilities can occur in. From this point of view, the last case (strongly resonant) is the most interesting. Then, the potentials belong to a special class of potentials, denoted by $\mathcal{SP}$, which seems unknown in the literature. The presented results appear to be new, even in the simplest case, when the uncoupled oscillators are not trapped in any set.