An example of instability in high-dimensional Hamiltonian systems

Abstract

In this article, we use a mechanism introduced by Herman, Marco and Sauzin to show that if a perturbation of a quasi-convex integrable Hamiltonian system is not too small with respect to the number of degrees of freedom, then the classical exponential stability estimates do not hold. Indeed, we construct an unstable solution whose drifting time is polynomial with respect to the inverse of the size of the perturbation. A different example was already given by Bourgain and Kaloshin, with a linear time of drift but with a perturbation which is larger than ours. As a consequence, we obtain a better upper bound on the threshold of validity of exponential stability estimates.