Related papers: Shortest billiard trajectories
We consider the billiard map inside a polyhedron. We give a condition for the stability of the periodic trajectories. We apply this result to the case of the tetrahedron. We deduce the existence of an open set of tetrahedra which have a…
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…
In this paper outer, or dual, billiards outside regular polygons are studied; in particular, periodic points for cases of strictly convex "tables" and for regular n-gons with n = 3,4,6,8,12 are discussed. The main results of the paper are:…
We propose geometric tools that are suitable for studying the behavior of a billiard trajectory in a homogeneous force field. Two examples are considered: a vertical plane with an open top and with a parabolic or right angle boundary at the…
Given a set $\mathcal{P}$ of $h$ pairwise disjoint simple polygonal obstacles in $\mathbb{R}^2$ defined with $n$ vertices, we compute a sketch $\Omega$ of $\mathcal{P}$ whose size is independent of $n$, depending only on $h$ and the input…
We study the geometry of billiard orbits on rectangular billiards. A truncated billiard orbit induces a partition of the rectangle into polygons. We prove that thirteen is a sharp upper bound for the number of different areas of these…
The celebrated Hardy-Landau lower bound for the error term in the Gauss's circle problem can be viewed as an estimate from below for the remainder in Weyl's law on a square, with either Dirichlet or Neumann boundary conditions. We prove an…
A comprehensive analysis of periodic trajectories of billiards within ellipses in the Euclidean plane is presented. The novelty of the approach is based on a relationship recently established by the authors between periodic billiard…
We show that for any natural number n, the set of domains containing absolutely periodic orbits of order n are dense in the set of bounded strictly convex domains with smooth boundary. The proof that such an orbit exists is an extension to…
We consider polygonal billiards and we show the uniqueness of coding of non-periodic billiard trajectories in polygons whose holes have non-zero minimal diameters, generalising a theorem of Galperin, Kr\"uger and Troubetzkoy.
Euclidean outer billiard on a regular polygon (that is not a triangle, square or a hexagon) has aperiodic points, i.e., points where all iterates of the outer billiard map are defined and yield pairwise distinct images. This result answers…
A classical result of Dowker (Bull. Amer. Math. Soc. 50: 120-122, 1944) states that for any plane convex body $K$ in the Euclidean plane, the areas of the maximum (resp. minimum) area convex $n$-gons inscribed (resp. circumscribed) in $K$…
It is proved by Brendle in [4] that the equatorial disk $D^k$ has least area among $k$-dimensional free boundary minimal surfaces in the Euclidean ball $B^n$. By comparing the excess of free boundary minimal surfaces with the excess of the…
For every quadrilateral sufficiently close to a rectangle, we shall show that it possess a periodic billiard path. This is an REU work done at ICERM in Summer 2012.
In this paper, we give detailed analysis and description of periodic trajectories of the billiard system within an ellipsoid in the 3-dimensional Minkowski space, taking into account all possibilities for the caustics. The conditions for…
The billiard motion inside an ellipsoid $Q \subset \Rset^{n+1}$ is completely integrable. Its phase space is a symplectic manifold of dimension $2n$, which is mostly foliated with Liouville tori of dimension $n$. The motion on each…
In an ordinary billiard system trajectories of a Hamiltonian system are elastically reflected after a collision with a hypersurface (scatterer). If the scatterer is a submanifold of codimension more than one, we say that the billiard is…
Polygonal billiards are an example of pseudo-chaotic dynamics, a combination of integrable evolution and sudden jumps due to conical singular points that arise from the corners of the polygons. Such pseudo-chaotic behaviour, often…
A simple $n$-gon is a polygon with $n$ edges with each vertex belonging to exactly two edges and every other point belonging to at most one edge. Brass asked the following question: For $n \geq 5$ odd, what is the maximum perimeter of a…
In our recent paper, we studied periodic billiard trajectories in the regular pentagon and closed geodesic on the double pentagon, a translation surface of genus two. In particular, we made a number of conjectures concerning symbolic…