Related papers: Does a billiard orbit determine its (polygonal) ta…
This paper is a sequel to my paper "Introducing the Plaid Model". In this paper it is shown that the plaid model has unbounded polygonal paths for every irrational parameter. This result parallels my result that outer billiards on kites has…
We establish sufficient conditions for the hyperbolicity of the billiard dynamics on surfaces of constant curvature. This extends known results for planar billiards. Using these conditions, we construct large classes of billiard tables with…
The configuration manifold $M$ of a mechanical system consisting of two unconstrained rigid bodies in $\mathbb{R}^n$, $n\geq 1$, is a manifold with boundary (typically with singularities.) A complete description of the system requires…
A periodic trajectory on a polygonal billiard table is stable if it persists under any sufficiently small perturbation of the table. It is a standard result that a periodic trajectory on an $n$-gon gives rise in a natural way to a closed…
We study periodic infinite billiards in the plane. We show that for rational models, some particular obstacles can be added periodically, so that the billiard flow in the resulting table is recurrent in almost every direction.
We consider the motion of a particle subjected to the constant gravitational field and scattered inelasticaly by hard boundaries which possess the shape of parabola, wedge, and hyperbola. The billiard itself performs oscillations. The…
Billiard systems offer a simple setting to study regular and chaotic dynamics. Gravitational billiards are generalizations of these classical billiards which are amenable to both analytical and experimental investigations. Most previous…
The arithmetic triangular billiards are classically chaotic but have Poissonian energy level statistics, in ostensible violation of the BGS conjecture. We show that the length spectra of their periodic orbits divides into subspectra…
A chain is an ordering of the integers 1 to n such that adjacent pairs have sums of a particular form, such as squares, cubes, triangular numbers, pentagonal numbers, or Fibonacci numbers. For example 4 1 2 3 5 form a Fibonacci chain while…
We study absolutely periodic points and trajectories of Hamiltonian systems. Our main result is a necessary and sufficient for a Hamiltonian system to have the following property: if there exists one absolutely periodic trajectory then all…
Semiclassical approximations often involve the use of stationary phase approximations. This method can be applied when $\hbar$ is small in comparison to relevant actions or action differences in the corresponding classical system. In many…
Cosmological billiards arise as a map of the solution of the Einstein equations, when the most general symmetry for the metric tensor is hypothesized, and points are considered as spatially decoupled in the asymptotic limit towards the…
In billiard systems with a flux line semiclassical approximations for the density of states contain contributions from periodic orbits as well as from diffractive orbits that are scattered on the flux line. We derive a semiclassical…
This paper is the third in a series which explores a combinatorial method for generating lattice polygons in the plane. I call this method the plaid model. In this paper I prove the main result I had been aiming for since the beginning,…
In a previous paper we defined a class of non-compact polygonal billiards, the infinite step billiards: to a given decreasing sequence of non-negative numbers $\{p_{n}$, there corresponds a table $\Bi := \bigcup_{n\in\N} [n,n+1] \times…
Outer billiards is a basic dynamical system, defined relative to a planar convex shape. This system was introduced in the 1950's by B.H. Neumann and later popularized in the 1970's by J. Moser. All along, one of the central questions has…
The problem when the order polytope and the chain polytope of a finite partially ordered set are unimodularly equivalent will be solved.
We study the stability properties of orbits in dispersing billiards in a homogeneous magnetic field by using a modified formalism based on the Bunimovich-Sinai curvature (horocycle method). We identify simple periodic orbits that can be…
We give a complete characterization of the relationship between the shape of a Euclidean polygon and the symbolic dynamics of its billiard flow. We prove that the only pairs of tables that can have the same bounce spectrum are right-angled…
We consider the dual billiard map with respect to a smooth strictly convex closed hypersurface in linear 2m-dimensional symplectic space and prove that it has at least 2m distinct 3-periodic orbits.