math.DS — Dynamical Systems
Uniqueness of four-body convex central configurations for all masses
We prove that for every choice of four positive masses and every cyclic ordering of the bodies there is exactly one strictly convex planar central configuration with that ordering, up to similarity. This answers Problem 10 in the list of Albouy, Cabral and Santos, which Santoprete calls the Simó--Yoccoz conjecture. The main step is a uniform lower bound for the Hessian at convex central configurations: it is at least one quarter of its radial part, which vanishes only on translations and rotations. Dziobek's relations turn the indefinite part of the Hessian into a negative multiple of a square, and a Cauchy--Schwarz argument bounds this term by the radial part times the trace of an explicit matrix in which the masses do not appear. We prove that this trace is less than by interval arithmetic on the three-dimensional set of normalized convex central configurations, in the coordinates of Corbera, Cors and Roberts. Uniqueness then follows by a covering argument from the case of four equal masses. The computation has been repeated with a second, independently written program. The Hessian bound and the uniqueness theorem, including the computation, have been formalized in the Lean proof assistant and checked by its kernel, using only the standard axioms. As consequences, every degenerate four-body central configuration is concave, the convex central configuration depends analytically on the masses, and the known symmetry theorems for kites, isosceles trapezoids and rhombi follow in a few lines. The analytic dependence and the symmetry theorems are also formalized.