Miller’s instability, microchaos and the short-term evolution of initially nearby orbits

We study the phase-space behaviour of nearby trajectories in integrable potentials. We show that the separation of nearby orbits initially diverges very fast, mimicking a nearly exponential behaviour, while at late times it grows linearly. This initial exponential phase, known as Miller’s instability, is commonly found in N-body simulations, and has been attributed to short-term (microscopic) N-body chaos. However we show here analytically that the initial divergence is simply due to the shape of an orbit in phase-space. This result confirms previous suspicions that this transient phenomenon is not related to an instability in the sense of non-integrable behaviour in the dynamics of N-body systems.