The Spherical Kapitza-Whitney Pendulum

Abstract

In this paper we study the global dynamics of the inverted spherical pendulum with a vertically vibrating suspension point in the presence of an external horizontal periodic force field. We do not assume that this force field is weak or rapidly oscillating. We prove that there always exists a non-falling periodic solution, i.e., there exists an initial condition such that the rod of the pendulum never becomes horizontal along the corresponding solution. We also show numerically that there exists an asymptotically stable non-falling solution for a wide range of parameters of the system.