Darboux points and integrability of Hamiltonian systems with homogeneous polynomial potential

In this paper we study the integrability of natural Hamiltonian systems with a homogeneous polynomial potential. The strongest necessary conditions for their integrability in the Liouville sense have been obtained by a study of the differential Galois group of variational equations along straight line solutions. These particular solutions can be viewed as points of a projective space of dimension smaller by one than the number of degrees of freedom. We call them Darboux points. We analyze in detail the case of two degrees of freedom. We show that, except for a radial potential, the number of Darboux points is finite and it is not greater than the degree of the potential. Moreover, we analyze cases when the number of Darboux points is smaller than maximal. For two degrees of freedom the above-mentioned necessary condition for integrability can be expressed in terms of one nontrivial eigenvalue of the Hessian of potential calculated at a Darboux point. We prove that for a given potential these nontrivial eigenvalues calculated for all Darboux points cannot be arbitrary because they satisfy a certain relation which we give in an explicit form. We use this fact to strengthen maximally the necessary conditions for integrability and we show that in a generic case, for a given degree of the potential, there is only a finite number of potentials which satisfy these conditions. We also describe the nongeneric cases. As an example we give a full list of potentials of degree four satisfying these conditions. Then, investigating the differential Galois group of higher order variational equations, we prove that, except for one discrete family, among these potentials only those which are already known to be integrable are integrable. We check that a finite number of potentials from the exceptional discrete family are not integrable, and we conjecture that all of them are not integrable. (C) 2005 American Institute of Physics.