Related papers: Capillary floating and the billiard ball problem
Planes and circular cylinders are models of interfaces of a fluid when the support surface is translationally invariant in a direction of the space. After a study of the eigenvalues of the Jacobi operator, it is investigated when planar…
The question of invisibility for bodies with mirror surface is studied in the framework of geometrical optics. We construct bodies that are invisible/have zero resistance in two mutually orthogonal directions, and prove that there do not…
This paper investigates the dynamics of optical billiards, a generalization of classic billiards, where light rays travel within a refractive medium and reflect elastically at the boundary. Inspired by studies of acoustic modes in rapidly…
The conjugation problem for billiard maps conjectures that if two strictly convex billiards have conjugated billiard maps, the billiard tables must be homothetic to each other. We show that if two billiard maps are conjugated, the…
The effective capillary interaction potentials for small colloidal particles trapped at the surface of liquid droplets are calculated analytically. Pair potentials between capillary monopoles and dipoles, corresponding to particles floating…
We study a system of an elastic ball moving in the non-relativistic spacetime with a nontrivial causal structure produced by a wormhole-based time machine. For such a system it is possible to formulate a simple model of the so-called…
The principal angles between binary collision subspaces in an $N$-billiard system in $d$-dimensional Euclidean space are computed. These angles are computed for equal masses and arbitrary masses. We then provide a bound on the number of…
The main purpose of part (III) is to give explicit geodesics and billiard orbits in polysquares that exhibit time-quantitative density. In many instances, we can even establish a best possible form of time-quantitative density called…
We describe conditions under which higher-dimensional billiard models in bounded, convex regions are fully chaotic, generalizing the Bunimovich stadium to dimensions above two. An example is a three-dimensional stadium bounded by a cylinder…
We consider a Kepler billiard with zero-energy in the plane defined inside a smooth closed connected simple curve which intersects all focused parabola at at most two points. {We show that} if has an invariant curve consisting of…
We study the collision dynamics of a spinning cue ball approaching a static object ball with equal mass on a plane, common in billiards. While typical collisions in billiards are nearly perfectly elastic, with a restitution coefficient…
We examine the quantum mechanical eigensolutions of the two-dimensional infinite well or quantum billiard system consisting of a circular boundary with an infinite barrier or baffle along a radius. Because of the change in boundary…
We discuss the propagation of kinetic energy through billiard balls fixed in place along a one-dimensional segment. The number of billiard balls is assumed to be large but finite and we assume kinetic energy propagates following the usual…
We present a simple experimental realization of a two-dimensional floating body that can remain in equilibrium in any orientation. This system is based on a class of shapes known as Zindler curves, which possess the remarkable geometric…
We study dissipative polygonal outer billiards, i.e. outer billiards about convex polygons with a contractive reflection law. We prove that dissipative outer billiards about any triangle and the square are asymptotically periodic, i.e. they…
Some of the subtleties of the integrability of the elliptic quantum billiard are discussed. A well known classical constant of the motion has in the quantum case an ill-defined commutator with the Hamiltonian. It is shown how this problem…
Dirichlet problem in an $n$-dimensional billiard space is investigated. In particular, the system of ODEs $\ddot x(t) = f(t,x(t))$ together with Dirichlet boundary conditions $x(0) = A$, $x(T) = B$ in an $n$-dimensional interval $K$ with…
Lensed billiards are an extension of the notion of billiard dynamical systems obtained by adding a potential function of the form $C1_{\mathcal{A}}$, where $C$ is a real valued constant and $1_{\mathcal{A}}$ is the indicator function of an…
Numerical computations suggest that each point on a certain optimized shape called the ideal trefoil is in contact with two other points. We consider sequences of such contact points, such that each point is in contact with its predecessor…
We define a new class of plane billiards - the `pensive billiard' - in which the billiard ball travels along the boundary for some distance depending on the incidence angle before reflecting, while preserving the billiard rule of equality…