Bifurcation of relative equilibria in mechanical systems with symmetry

The relative equilibria of a symmetric Hamiltonian dynamical system are the critical points of the so-called augmented Hamiltonian. The underlying geometric structure of the system is used to decompose the critical point equations and construct a collection of implicitly defined functions and reduced equations describing the set of relative equilibria in a neighborhood of a given relative equilibrium. The structure of the reduced equations is studied in a few relevant situations. In particular, a persistence result of Lerman and Singer [Nonlinearity 11 (1998) 16371649] is generalized to the framework of Abelian proper actions. Also, a Hamiltonian version of the Equivariant Branching Lemma and a study of bifurcations with maximal isotropy are presented. An elementary example illustrates the use of this approach. (C) 2003 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.