English

Billiards in a general domain with random reflections

Probability 2012-01-31 v4 Dynamical Systems

Abstract

We study stochastic billiards on general tables: a particle moves according to its constant velocity inside some domain DRd{\mathcal D} \subset {\mathbb R}^d until it hits the boundary and bounces randomly inside according to some reflection law. We assume that the boundary of the domain is locally Lipschitz and almost everywhere continuously differentiable. The angle of the outgoing velocity with the inner normal vector has a specified, absolutely continuous density. We construct the discrete time and the continuous time processes recording the sequence of hitting points on the boundary and the pair location/velocity. We mainly focus on the case of bounded domains. Then, we prove exponential ergodicity of these two Markov processes, we study their invariant distribution and their normal (Gaussian) fluctuations. Of particular interest is the case of the cosine reflection law: the stationary distributions for the two processes are uniform in this case, the discrete time chain is reversible though the continuous time process is quasi-reversible. Also in this case, we give a natural construction of a chord "picked at random" in D{\mathcal D}, and we study the angle of intersection of the process with a (d1)(d-1)-dimensional manifold contained in D{\mathcal D}.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.math/0612799,
  title  = {Billiards in a general domain with random reflections},
  author = {Francis Comets and Serguei Popov and Gunter Schütz and Marina Vachkovskaia},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:math/0612799},
  year   = {2012}
}

Comments

50 pages, 10 figures; To appear in: Archive for Rational Mechanics and Analysis; corrected Theorem 2.8 (induced chords in nonconvex subdomains)