Related papers: Billiards on Graphs
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…
A periodic orbit on a frictionless billiard table is a piecewise linear path of a billiard ball that begins and ends at the same point with the same angle of incidence. The period of a primitive periodic orbit is the number of times the…
The billiard problem of statistical physics is considered in a new geometric approach with a symmetric phase space. The structure and topological features of typical billiard phase portrait are defined. The connection between geometric,…
We investigate dynamical properties of chaotic trajectories in mushroom billiards. These billiards present a well-defined simple border between a single regular region and a single chaotic component. We find that the stickiness of chaotic…
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,…
It is shown that the set of 4-period orbits in outer billiard with piecewise smooth convex boundary has an empty interior, provided that no four corners of the boundary form a parallelogram.
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 study non-Birkhoff periodic orbits in symmetric convex planar billiards. Our main result provides a quantitative criterion for the existence of such orbits with prescribed minimal period, rotation number, and spatiotemporal symmetry. We…
We study the dynamics of one-particle and few-particle billiard systems in containers of various shapes. In few-particle systems, the particles collide elastically both against the boundary and against each other. In the one-particle case,…
Dan Reznik found, by computer experimentation, a number of conserved quantities associated with periodic billiard trajectories in ellipses. We prove some of his observations using a non-standard generating function for the billiard ball…
Outer Billiards is a geometrically inspired dynamical system based on a convex shape in the plane. When the shape is a polygon, the system has a combinatorial flavor. In the polygonal case, there is a natural acceleration of the map, a…
A simple relation is developed between elastic collisions of freely-moving point particles in one dimension and a corresponding billiard system. For two particles with masses m_1 and m_2 on the half-line x>0 that approach an elastic barrier…
We investigate a rotated, orthogonal gravitational wedge billiard - a special case of the asymmetric wedge billiard - in which the dynamics are integrable. We derive equations and conditions under which periodic orbits may be constructed…
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…
Gravitational billiards provide an experimentally accessible arena for testing formulations of nonlinear dynamics. We present a mathematical model that captures the essential dynamics required for describing the motion of a realistic…
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.
We study some statistical properties for the behavior of the average squared velocity -- hence the temperature -- for an ensemble of classical particles moving in a billiard whose boundary is time dependent. We assume the collisions of the…
We consider systems of "pinned balls," i.e., balls that have fixed positions and pseudo-velocities. Pseudo-velocities change according to the same rules as those for velocities of totally elastic collisions between moving balls. The times…
We study the quantal energy spectrum of triangular billiards on a spherical surface. Group theory yields analytical results for tiling billiards while the generic case is treated numerically. We find that the statistical properties of the…
We generalize the following simple geometric fact: the only centrally symmetric convex curve of constant width is a circle. Billiard interpretation of the condition of constant width reads: a planar curve has constant width, if and only if,…