Homoclinic chaos in the Hamiltonian dynamics of extended test bodies

There is a long tradition of studying chaotic trajectories in systems whose integrability is broken by means of an external perturbation. Here we explore a different route to chaos, in the dynamics of extended bodies, which arises due to finite-size corrections to the otherwise integrable motion of a test particle. We find that cyclic changes in the overall shape of the body may lead to the onset of chaos. This is applied to the Duffing and Yukawa potentials. For Kepler’s potential, periodic deviations from spherical symmetry give rise to chaotic regions around the unperturbed parabolic orbit.