Chaos in the Gyldén problem

Abstract

We consider the Gyldén problem—a perturbation of the Kepler problem via an explicit function of time. For certain general classes of planar periodic perturbations, after proving a Poincaré–Melnikov-type criterion, we find a manifold of orbits in which the dynamics is given by the shift automorphism on the set of bi-infinite sequences with infinitely many symbols. We achieve the main result by computing the Melnikov integral explicitly.