Nearly-integrable almost-symplectic Hamiltonian systems

TL;DR

This paper investigates small perturbations of integrable Hamiltonian systems on almost-symplectic manifolds, showing that while KAM theory does not apply, a weak Nekhoroshev stability result holds with polynomial time scales.

Contribution

It introduces the study of perturbations of almost-symplectic Hamiltonian systems, analyzing their properties and establishing a Nekhoroshev-type stability result for non-strongly Hamiltonian perturbations.

Findings

KAM theorem does not apply to these systems.

A weak Nekhoroshev stability theorem is valid.

Stability time scales are polynomial in the inverse of the perturbation.

Abstract

Integrable Hamiltonian systems on almost-symplectic manifolds have recently drawn some attention. Under suitable properties, they have a structure analogous to those of standard symplectic-Hamiltonian completely integrable systems. Here we study small Hamiltonian perturbations of these systems. Preliminarily, we investigate some general properties of these systems. In particular, we show that if the perturbation is `strongly Hamiltonian' (namely, its Hamiltonian vector field is also a symmetry of the almost-Hamiltonian structure) then the system reduces, under an almost-symplectic version of symplectic reduction, to a family of nearly integrable standard symplectic-Hamiltonian vector fields on a reduced phase space, of codimension not less than 3. Therefore, we restrict our study to non-strongly Hamiltonian perturbations. We will show that KAM theorem on the survival of strongly nonresonant quasi-periodic tori does non apply, but that a weak version of Nekhoroshev theorem on the stability of actions is instead valid, even though for a time scale which is polynomial (rather than exponential) in the inverse of the perturbation parameter.