Breakdown of homoclinic orbits to L₃: Nonvanishing of the Stokes constant

The Restricted Planar Circular 3-Body Problem models the motion of a body of negligible mass under the gravitational influence of two massive bodies, called the primaries, which perform circular orbits coplanar with that of the massless body. In rotating coordinates, it can be modelled by a two degrees of freedom Hamiltonian system, which has five critical points called the Lagrange points. Among them, the point L₃ is a saddle-center which is collinear with the primaries and beyond the largest of the two. The papers 3, 4 provide an asymptotic formula for the distance between the one dimensional stable and unstable manifolds of L₃ in a transverse section for small values of the mass ratio 0 < 1. This distance is exponentially small with respect to and its first order depends on what is usually called a Stokes constant. The non-vanishing of this constant implies that the distance between the invariant manifolds at the section is not zero. In this paper, we prove that the Stokes constant is non-zero. The proof is computer assisted.