Bifurcations of normally parabolic tori in Hamiltonian systems

Abstract

We consider perturbations of integrable Hamiltonian systems in the neighbourhood of normally parabolic invariant tori. Under appropriate transversality conditions the tori in the unperturbed system bifurcate according to a (generalized) cuspoid catastrophe. Combining techniques of KAM theory and singularity theory, we show that such bifurcation scenarios survive the perturbation on large Cantor sets. Applications to rigid body dynamics and forced oscillators are pointed out.