The Bifurcation Analysis and the Conley Index in Mechanics

The paper is devoted to the bifurcation analysis and the Conley index in Hamiltonian dynamical systems. We discuss the phenomenon of appearance (disappearance) of equilibrium points under the change of the Morse index of a critical point of a Hamiltonian. As an application of these techniques we find new relative equilibria in the problem of the motion of three point vortices of equal intensity in a circular domain.