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We consider a billiard in the plane with periodic configuration of convex scatterers. This system is recurrent, in the sense that almost every orbit comes back arbitrarily close to the initial point. In this paper we study the time needed…
In this paper, we define a variant of billiards in which the ball bounces around a square grid erasing walls as it goes. We prove that there exist periodic tunnels with arbitrarily large period from any possible starting point, that there…
A caustic of a billiard is a curve whose tangent lines are reflected to its own tangent lines. A billiard is called Birkhoff caustic-integrable, if there exists a topological annulus adjacent to its boundary from inside that is foliated by…
A billiard in the form of a stadium with periodically perturbed boundary is considered. Two types of such billiards are studied: stadium with strong chaotic properties and a near-rectangle billiard. Phase portraits of such billiards are…
We prove some recent experimental observations of D. Reznik concerning periodic billiard orbits in ellipses. For example, the sum of cosines of the angles of a periodic billiard polygon remains constant in the one-parameter family of such…
We provide lower bounds on the number of periodic Finsler billiard trajectories inside a quadratically convex smooth closed hypersurface $M$ in a $d$-dimensional Finsler space with possibly irreversible Finsler metric. An example of such a…
We study combinatorics of billiard partitions which arose recently in the description of periodic trajectories of ellipsoidal billiards in d-dimensional Euclidean and pseudo-Euclidean spaces. Such partitions uniquely codify the sets of…
A scattering process can be described by suitably closing the system and considering the first return map from the entrance onto itself. This scattering map may be singular and discontinuous, but it will be measure preserving as a…
We derive contributions to the trace formula for the spectral density accounting for the role of diffractive orbits in two-dimensional billiard systems with corners. This is achieved by using the exact Sommerfeld solution for the Green…
We examine the quantum energy levels of rectangular billiards with a pointlike scatterer in one and two dimensions. By varying the location and the strength of the scatterer, we systematically find diabolical degeneracies among various…
Let $f: [0, +\infty) \to (0, +\infty)$ be a sufficiently smooth convex function, vanishing at infinity. Consider the planar domain $Q$ delimited by the positive $x$-semiaxis, the positive $y$-semiaxis, and the graph of $f$. Under certain…
A degree sequence is a sequence ${\bf s}=(N_i,i\geq 0)$ of non-negative integers satisfying $1+\sum_i iN_i=\sum_i N_i<\infty$. We are interested in the uniform distribution $\mathbb{P}_{{\bf s}}$ on rooted plane trees whose degree sequence…
Periodic billiard orbits are dense in the phase space of an irrational right triangle. A stronger pointwise density result is also proven.
We construct Birkhoff cones for dispersing billiards, which are contracted by the action of the transfer operator. This construction permits the study of statistical properties not only of regular dispersing billiards but also of sequential…
Most terrestrial sand seas form at `horse' latitudes, where the wind direction exhibits seasonal variation. Here, we extend the two-dimensional linear stability analysis of a flat sand bed associated with a unidirectional wind to the…
We study recurrence and transience for a particle that moves at constant velocity in the interior of an unbounded planar domain, with random reflections at the boundary governed by a Markov kernel producing outgoing angles from incoming…
We describe a one-parameter family of dispersing (hence hyperbolic, ergodic and mixing) billiards where the correlation function of the collision map decays as $1/n^a$ (here $n$ denotes the discrete time), in which the degree $a \in (1,…
We calculate the diffusion coefficients of persistent random walks on cubic and hypercubic lattices, where the direction of a walker at a given step depends on the memory of one or two previous steps. These results are then applied to study…
In the class of projective billiards, which contains the usual billiards, we exhibit counter-examples to Ivrii's conjecture, which states that in any planar billiard with smooth boundary the set of periodic orbits has zero measure. The…
A "drivebelt" stadium billiard with boundary consisting of circular arcs of differing radius connected by their common tangents shares many properties with the conventional "straight" stadium, including hyperbolicity and mixing, as well as…