Frozen planet orbits for the $n$-electron atom

Abstract

We seek periodic trajectories of a system of multiple mutually repelling electrons on a half-line, with an attractive nucleus sitting at the origin. We adopt a variational viewpoint and study critical points of the associated Lagrange-action functional, by means of a modified Lusternik-Schnirelmann theory for manifolds with boundary. Additionally, when the charges of the electrons tend to zero, we show that frozen planet orbits converge to segments of a brake orbit for a Kepler-type problem, establishing a strong analogy with the Schubart orbits of the gravitational $n$-body problem.