TITLE: Normal-internal resonances in quasi-periodically forced oscillators: a conservative approach AUTHORS: Henk Broer^(1), Heinz Hanssmann^(2), Angel Jorba^(3), Jordi Villanueva^(4), Florian Wagener^(5) (1) broer@math.rug.nl Instituut voor Wiskunde en Informatica (IWI), Rijksuniversiteit Groningen, Postbus 800, 9700 AV Groningen, The Netherlands. (2) Heinz@iram.rwth-aachen.de Institut fur Reine und Angewandte Mathematik der RWTH Aachen, 52056 Aachen, Germany. (3) angel@maia.ub.es Departament de Matematica Aplicada i Analisi, Universitat de Barcelona, Gran Via 585, 08007 Barcelona, Spain. (4) jordi@vilma.upc.es Departament de Matematica Aplicada I, Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya, Diagonal 647, 08028 Barcelona, Spain. (5) f.o.o.wagener@uva.nl Center for Nonlinear Dynamics in Economics and Finance (CeNDEF), Department of Quantitative Economics, Universiteit van Amsterdam, Roetersstraat 11, 1018 WB Amsterdam, The Netherlands. ABSTRACT: We perform a bifurcation analysis of normal-internal resonances in parametrised families of quasi-periodically forced Hamiltonian oscillators, for small forcing. The unforced system is a one degree of freedom oscillator, called the `backbone' system; forced, the system is a skew-product flow with a quasi-periodic driving with~$n$ basic frequencies. The dynamics of the forced system are simplified by averaging over the orbits of a linearisation of the unforced system. The averaged system turns out to have the same structure as in the well-known case of periodic forcing ($n=1$); for a real analytic system, the non-integrable part can even be made exponentially small in the forcing strength. We investigate the persistence and the bifurcations of quasi-periodic $n$-dimensional tori in the averaged system, filling normal-internal resonance `gaps' that had been excluded in previous analyses. However, these gaps cannot completely be filled up: secondary resonance gaps appear, to which the averaging analysis can be applied again. This phenomenon of `gaps within gaps' makes the quasi-periodic case more complicated than the periodic case.