Related papers: Capillary floating and the billiard ball problem
We present numerical evidence which strongly suggests that irrational triangular billiards (all angles irrational with $\pi$) are mixing. Since these systems are known to have zero Kolmogorov-Sinai entropy, they may play an important role…
We discuss several problems in quasiclassical physics for which approximate solutions were recently obtained by a new method, and which can also be solved by novel versions of the Born-Oppenheimer approximation. These cases include the…
We define billiards in the context of sub-Finsler Geometry. We provide symplectic and variational (or rather, control theoretical) descriptions of the problem and show that they coincide. We then discuss several phenomena in this setting,…
We construct non-flat minimal capillary cones with bi-orthogonal symmetry groups for any dimension and contact angle. These cones interpolate between rescalings of a singular solution to the one-phase problem and the free-boundary cone…
A correspondence between the orbits of a system of 2 complex, homogeneous, polynomial ordinary differential equations with real coefficients and those of a polygonal billiard is displayed. This correspondence is general, in the sense that…
Recent experiments and numerical simulations have shown that certain types of microorganisms "reflect" off of a flat surface at a critical angle of departure, independent of the angle of incidence. The nature of the reflection may be active…
The ideal Galton board and Lorentz gas billiard models have been studied numerically and analytically primarily in settings where friction and rotational velocity are neglected. We eliminate these simplifying assumptions and study the…
We explore the triangle outer billiards map in points at infinity in the hyperbolic plane, focusing on the rotation number. Building on Dogru and Tabachnikov's work, which established the conditions for triangles where the rotation number…
Caustics are curves with the property that a billiard trajectory, once tangent to it, stays tangent after every reflection at the boundary of the billiard table. When the billiard table is an ellipse, any nonsingular billiard trajectory has…
We introduce a new class of billiard-like system, ``bouncing outer billiards" which are 3-dimensional cousins of outer billiards of Neumann and Moser. We prove that bouncing outer billiard on a smooth convex body has at least four…
The famous conjecture of V.Ya.Ivrii (1978) says that {\it in every billiard with infinitely-smooth boundary in a Euclidean space the set of periodic orbits has measure zero}. In the present paper we study the complex algebraic version of…
Rational polygonal billiards are one of the key models among the larger class of pseudo-integrable billiards. Their billiard flow may be lifted to the geodesic flow on a translation surface. Whereas such classical billiards have been much…
We consider a mechanical system consisting of an infinite rod (a straight line) and a ball (a massless point) on the plane. The rod rotates uniformly around one of its points. The ball is reflected elastically when colliding with the rod…
We design a computational experiment in which a quantum particle tunnels into a billiard of variable shape and scatters out of it through a double-slit opening on the billiard's base. The interference patterns produced by the scattered…
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…
The Lax representations of the geodesic flow, the Jacobi-Rosochatius problem and its perturbations by means of separable polynomial potentials, on a ellipsoid are constructed. We prove complete integrability in the case of a generic…
We consider the free boundary problem for a liquid drop of nearly spherical shape with capillarity, and we study the existence of nontrivial (i.e., non spherical) rotating traveling profiles bifurcating from the spherical shape, where the…
The famous conjecture of V.Ya.Ivrii (1978) says that {\it in every billiard with infinitely-smooth boundary in a Euclidean space the set of periodic orbits has measure zero}. In the present paper we study the complex version of Ivrii's…
The self-similar Lorentz billiard channel is a spatially extended deterministic dynamical system which consists of an infinite one-dimensional sequence of cells whose sizes increase monotonically according to their indices. This special…
We consider a polygon in a two-dimensional plane with a homogeneous constant magnetic field orthogonal to such plane, but inside the polygon, the magnetic field is zero. We study the dynamics of an electron with an initial velocity in this…