Related papers: Outer billiards
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 table is modeled as an $n$-dimensional box $[0,a_1]\times [0,a_2]\times \ldots \times [0,a_n] \subset \mathbb{R}^n$, with each side having real-valued lengths $a_i$ that are pairwise commensurable. A ball is launched from the…
Inverting the vertices of elliptic billiard N-periodics with respect to a circle centered on one focus yields a new "focus-inversive" family inscribed in Pascal's Lima\c{c}on. The following are some of its surprising invariants: (i)…
Consider a periodical (in two independent directions) tiling of the plane with polygons (faces). In this article we shall only give examples using squares, regular hexagons, equilateral triangles and parallelograms ("unions" of two…
In standard (mathematical) billiards a point particle moves uniformly in a billiard table with elastic reflections off the boundary. We show that in transition from mathematical billiards to physical billiards, where a finite size hard…
We consider billiard systems within compact domains bounded by confocal conics on a hyperboloid of one sheet in the Minkowski space. We derive conditions for elliptic periodicity for such billiards. We describe the topology of those…
We study dynamical properties of the billiard flow on convex polyhedra away from a neighbourhood of the non-smooth part of the boundary, called ``pockets''. We prove there are only finitely many immersed periodic tubes missing the pockets…
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…
This work presents a framework for billiards in convex domains on two dimensional Riemannian manifolds. These domains are contained in connected, simply connected open subsets which are totally normal. In this context, some basic properties…
The article studies a generalization of the elliptic billiard to the complex domain. We show that the billiard orbits also have caustics, and that the number of such caustics is bigger than for the real case. For example, for a given…
Astute variations in the geometry of mathematical billiard tables have been and continue to be a source of understanding their wide range of dynamical behaviors, from regular to chaotic. Viewing standard specular billiards in the broader…
We study polygonal billiards with reflection laws contracting the reflected angle towards the normal. It is shown that if a polygon does not have parallel sides facing each other, then the corresponding billiard map has finitely many…
Recently were introduced physical billiards where a moving particle is a hard sphere rather than a point as in standard mathematical billiards. It has been shown that in the same billiard tables the physical billiards may have totally…
Optical mushroom shaped billiards offer a unique opportunity to isolate and study non-dispersive, marginally unstable periodic orbits. Here we show that the openness of the cavity to external fields presents unanticipated consequences for…
We study length-minimizing closed generalized Euclidean billiard trajectories in convex bodies in $\mathbb{R}^n$ and investigate their relation to the inclusion minimal affine sections that contain these trajectories. We show that when…
We consider 3-periodic orbits in an elliptic billiard. Numerical experiments conducted by Dan Reznik have shown that the locus of the centers of inscribed circles of the corresponding triangles is an ellipse. We prove this fact by the…
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…
We present a link between billiards in convex plane domains and Hofer's geometry, an area of symplectic topology. For smooth strictly convex billiard tables, we prove that the Hofer distance between the corresponding billiard ball maps…
We study the dynamics of billiard models with a modified collision rule: the outgoing angle from a collision is a uniform contraction, by a factor lambda, of the incident angle. These pinball billiards interpolate between a one-dimensional…
We give an explicit sub-exponential estimate on the growth rate of periodic orbits and generalized diagonals for typical triangle billiards.