Transitive decomposition of symmetry groups for the n-body problem

Periodic and quasi-periodic solutions of the n-body problem are critical points of the action functional constrained to the Sobolev space of symmetric loops. Variational methods yield collisionless orbits provided the group of symmetries fulfills certain conditions (such as the rotating circle property). Here we generalize such conditions to more general group types and show how to constructively classify all groups satisfying such hypothesis, by a decomposition into irreducible transitive components. As examples we show approximate trajectories of some of the resulting symmetric minimizers. © 2007 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.