Published online by Cambridge University Press: 19 September 2008
We consider a compound central field in the Euclidean plane which is governed by a finite number of bell-shaped potential functions with finite range. The study of the qualitative behavior of the Hamilton flow in such a potential field can be reduced to that of the so-called perturbed billiards system. The main result in this paper is the construction of a symbolic dynamics of the Hamilton flow by using the perturbed billiards system provided that the energy E > 0 is small enough. We also try to show an analogue of the prime number theorem for the closed orbits of the flow following ideas presented by Morita and Parry and Pollicott.