Herman's converse KAM mechanism revisited

Abstract

In his celebrated counterexample to the KAM theorem, Herman introduced a perturbation of an integrable system consisting of two components: a hyperbolic term and a bump function. He also remarked that it was unclear whether the bump function was truly necessary. In this note, we prove that the bump function is indeed necessary when more natural hyperbolic perturbations are considered. The proof of this necessity relies on an improved Siegel--Brjuno estimate and a parameter-dependent renormalization of resonances within the direct KAM method.