On Cayley conditions for billiards inside ellipsoids
Dynamical Systems
2015-05-04 v1 Exactly Solvable and Integrable Systems
Abstract
All the segments (or their continuations) of a billiard trajectory inside an ellipsoid of are tangent to n-1 quadrics of the pencil of confocal quadrics determined by the ellipsoid. The quadrics associated to periodic billiard trajectories verify certain algebraic conditions. Cayley found them in the planar case. Dragovi\'{c} and Radnovi\'{c} generalized them to any dimension. We rewrite the original matrix formulation of these generalized Cayley conditions as a simpler polynomial one. We find several remarkable algebraic relations between caustic parameters and ellipsoidal parameters that give rise to nonsingular periodic trajectories.
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Cite
@article{arxiv.1211.6557,
title = {On Cayley conditions for billiards inside ellipsoids},
author = {Rafael Ramirez-Ros},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1211.6557},
year = {2015}
}
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26 pages