The Poincar\'e reduction problem for geodesics on deformed spheres

Abstract

We study geodesics on hypersurfaces close to the standard (n-1)-dimensional sphere in n-dimensional Euclidean space. Following Poincar\'e, we treat the problem within the framework of the analytical mechanics, and employ the perturbation theory with the view of obtaining a topological classification of the set of geodesics on a manifold. To that end we use the X-ray transform familiar in the integral geometry, and obtain the system of averaged equations of motion, which turns out to be a Hamiltonian one. The system serves an asymptotic reduction of the initial exact system of 2n-2 equations to that of 2n-4 equations on the Grassmann manifold G(2,n). The Poisson brackets of the reduction system are determined by the Lie algebra of the group SO(n). In the important cases of two-dimensional and a range of three-dimensional hypersurfaces it allows a topological classification of the set of geodesics.