English

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 \Rsetn\Rset^n 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.

Keywords

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}
}

Comments

26 pages

R2 v1 2026-06-21T22:45:21.408Z