Lyapunov unstable elliptic equilibria

A new diffusion mechanism from the neighborhood of elliptic equilibria for Hamiltonian flows in three or more degrees of freedom is introduced. We thus obtain explicit real entire Hamiltonians on R 2 d \mathbb {R}^{2d} , d ≥ 4 d\geq 4 , that have a Lyapunov unstable elliptic equilibrium with an arbitrary chosen frequency vector whose coordinates are not all of the same sign. For non-resonant frequency vectors, our examples all have divergent Birkhoff normal form at the equilibrium. On R 4 \mathbb {R}^4 , we give explicit examples of real entire Hamiltonians having an equilibrium with an arbitrary chosen non-resonant frequency vector and a divergent Birkhoff normal form.