Related papers: Outer Billiards, Arithmetic Graphs, and the Octago…
The seminal physical model for investigating formulations of nonlinear dynamics is the billiard. Gravitational billiards provide an experimentally accessible arena for their investigation. We present a mathematical model that captures the…
In this paper we show that, under certain generic conditions, billiards on ovals have only a finite number of periodic orbits, for each period, all non-degenerate and at least one of them is hyperbolic. Moreover, the invariant curves of two…
From a geometric viewpoint, billiard trajectories and geodesics are related by mutual approximation results. In one direction, it is known that every geodesic curve in the boundary of a smooth convex body can be approximated by a sequence…
Dynamical billiards consist of a particle on a two-dimensional table, bouncing elastically off a boundary curve. The state of the system is given by two numbers: one describing the location along the curve where the bounce occurs, and…
The goal of this paper is an analysis of the geometry of billiards in ellipses, based on properties of confocal central conics. The extended sides of the billiards meet at points which are located on confocal ellipses and hyperbolas. They…
We study outer length billiards; our main results are as follows. We prove 3- and 4-periodic versions of the Ivrii conjecture. We show that, for every period $n\ge 3$, there exists a functional space of billiard tables that possess…
While billiard systems of various shapes have been used as paradigmatic model systems in the fields of nonlinear dynamics and quantum chaos, few studies have investigated anisotropic billiards. Motivated by the tremendous advances in using…
We study the billiard dynamics in annular tables between two excentric circles. As the center and the radius of the inner circle change, a two parameters map is defined by the first return of trajectories to the obstacle. We obtain an…
We introduce the spherical wedge billiard, a dynamical system consisting of a particle moving along a geodesic on a closed non-Euclidean surface of a spherical wedge. We derive the analytic form of the corresponding Poincar\'e map and find…
We introduce a new class of billiard systems in the plane, with boundaries formed by finitely many arcs of confocal conics such that they contain some reflex angles. Fundamental dynamical, topological, geometric, and arithmetic properties…
We consider classical billiards in plane, connected, but not necessarily bounded domains. The charged billiard ball is immersed in a homogeneous, stationary magnetic field perpendicular to the plane. The part of dynamics which is not…
A class of non-compact billiards is introduced, namely the infinite step billiards, i.e., systems of a point particle moving freely in the domain $\Omega = \bigcup_{n\in\N} [n,n+1] \times [0,p_n]$, with elastic reflections on the boundary;…
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…
For a class of flows on polytopes, including many examples from Evolutionary Game Theory, we describe a piecewise linear model which encapsulates the asymptotic dynamics along the heteroclinic network formed out of the polytope's vertexes…
We introduce symplectic billiards for pairs of possibly non-convex polygons. After establishing basic properties, we give several criteria on pairs of polygons for the symplectic billiard map to be fully periodic, i.e. $\textit{every}$…
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…
We apply round-off to planar rotations, obtaining a one-parameter family of invertible maps of a two-dimensional lattice. As the angle of rotation approaches pi/2, the fourth iterate of the map produces piecewise-rectilinear motion, which…
The present work consists of a numerical study of the dynamics of irrational polygonal billiards. Our contribution reinforces the hypothesis that these systems could be Strongly Mixing, although never demonstrably chaotic, and discuss the…
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 present a link between billiards in convex plane domains and Hofer's geometry, an area of symplectic topology. For smooth strictly convex billiard tables, we prove that the Hofer distance between the corresponding billiard ball maps…