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