A note on relative equilibria of multidimensional rigid body

Abstract

It is well known that a rotation of a free generic three-dimensional rigid body is stationary if and only if it is a rotation around one of three principal axes of inertia. As it was noted by many authors, the analogous result is true for a multidimensional body: a rotation is stationary if and only if it is a rotation in the principal axes of inertia, provided that the eigenvalues of the angular velocity matrix are pairwise distinct. However, if some eigenvalues of the angular velocity matrix of a stationary rotation coincide, then it is possible that this rotation has a different nature. A description of such rotations is given in the present paper.