THEMATIC PROGRAMS

April 18, 2024

Numerical and Computational Challenges in Science and Engineering Program

Francesco Fasso, University of Padova (Italy)

LECTURE

January 11, 2002

Numerical Investigation of Slow Chaos in Rigid Body Dynamics

The talk focuses on numerical integrations of a slightly perturbed rigid body with the aim of detecting "slowly chaotic" motions of the system. "Slow chaos" is a phenomenon which is associated to resonances in perturbed superintegrable Hamiltonian systems and takes place on very long time scales. Because of this, symplectic methods are valuable. We describe an approach to symplectic integration on manifolds based on an implementation of the splitting method using
different systems of local coordinates (Euler angles, in the rigid body case). The method performs very well for an axially symmetric rigid body; there are open problems for asymmetric bodies.

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