Smooth Hamiltonian Systems with Soft Impacts

In a Hamiltonian system with impacts (or "billiard with potential"), a point particle moves about the interior of a bounded domain according to a background potential and undergoes elastic collisions at the boundaries. When the background potential is identically zero, this is the hard-wall billiard model. Previous results on smooth billiard models (where the hard-wall boundary is replaced by a steep smooth billiard-like potential) have clarified how a smooth billiard may be rigorously approximated using a hard-wall billiard. These results are extended here to models with smooth background potential satisfying some natural conditions. This generalization is then applied to geometric models of collinear triatomic chemical reactions. (The models are far from integrable n-degree-of-freedom systems with n >= 2.) The application demonstrates that the simpler analytical calculations for the hard-wall system may be used to obtain qualitative information with regard to the solution structure of the smooth system and to quantitatively assist in finding solutions of the soft impact system by continuation methods. In particular, stable periodic triatomic configurations are easily located for the smooth highly nonlinear two- and three-degree-of-freedom geometric models.