Dziobek equilibrium configurations on a sphere

Abstract

We investigate the n-body problem on a sphere with a general interaction potential that depends on the mutual distances. We focus on the equilibrium configurations, especially on the Dziobek equilibrium configurations, which is an analogy of Dziobek central configurations of the classical n-body problem. We obtain a criterion and then reduce it to two sets of equations. Then we apply these equations to the curved n-body problem in S^3. In the end, we find the derivative of the Cayley-Menger determinant.