Nondegeneracy and integral count of frozen planet orbits in helium

Abstract

We study a family of action functionals whose critical points interpolate between frozen planet orbits for the helium atom with mean interaction between the electrons and the free fall. The rather surprising first result of this paper asserts that for the whole family, critical points are always nondegenerate. This implies that the frozen planet orbit with mean interaction is nondegenerate and gives a new proof of its uniqueness. As an application, we show that the integral count of frozen planet orbits with instantaneous interaction equals one. For this, we prove orientability of the determinant line bundle over the space of selfadjoint Fredholm operators with spectrum bounded from below, and use it to define an integer valued Euler characteristic for Fredholm sections whose linearization belongs to this class.