High frequency behavior of a rolling ball and simplification of the separation equation

The Chaplygin separation equation for a rolling axisymmetric ball has an algebraic expression for the effective potential V (z = cosθ, D, λ) that is difficult to analyze. We simplify this expression for the potential and find a 2-parameter family for when the potential becomes a rational function of z = cosθ. Then this separation equation becomes similar to the separation equation for the heavy symmetric top. For nutational solutions of a rolling sphere, we study a high frequency ω ₃-dependence of the width of the nutational band, the depth of motion above V(z _min,D, λ) and the ω ₃-dependence of nutational frequency $tfrac{{2pi }} {T} $ .