Jordan-Block Degeneracy and Cubic-Order Bifurcating Periodic Orbits in Minimum-Energy Optimal Control of Hamiltonian Equilibria
Equilibria of the Hamiltonian system associated with Pontryagin's minimum principle exhibit an exact doubling of the natural spectrum and, under a simple pairing condition, a Jordan block at every simple purely imaginary eigenvalue. Consequently, the classical Lyapunov Center Theorem does not apply to the augmented system, and no periodic orbit with nonzero optimal control bifurcates at linear order. We establish this mechanism in general and show that an optimal-control-induced periodic family emerges at cubic order in a Lindstedt--Poincaré expansion. The mechanism is illustrated in closed form for the pendulum and evaluated numerically for the planar $L_2$ equilibrium of Hill's restricted three-body problem, where the third-order approximation is validated against an independently computed family of periodic orbits.