Related papers: The plaid model and outer billiards on kites
We study polygonal billiards with one-sided vertical mirror scattered on a square billiard table. We associate trajectories of these kinds of billiards with double rotations and study orbit behavior and questions of complexity.
We prove that if the outer billiard map around a plane oval is algebraically integrable in a certain non-degenerate sense then the oval is an ellipse.
We study billiards in plane domains, with a perpendicular magnetic field and a potential. We give some results on periodic orbits, KAM tori and adiabatic invariants. We also prove the existence of bound states in a related scattering…
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…
Consider a collection of points in the plane and the sets of slopes or directions of the lines between pairs of points. It is known that the algebraic matroid on the set of direction constraints between the points is equivalent to the…
This survey is based on a series of talks I gave at the conference "Dynamical systems and diophantine approximation" at l'Instut Henri Poincar\'e in June 2003. I will present asymptotic results (transitivity, ergodicity, weak-mixing) for…
Given a periodic graph, we wish to determine via combinatorial methods whether it has periodic embeddings in the plane that -- via motions that preserve edge-lengths and periodicity -- can be continuously deformed into another non-congruent…
We introduce a new method for estimating the growth of various quantities arising in dynamical systems. We apply our method to polygonal billiards on surfaces of constant curvature. For instance, we obtain power bounds of degree two plus…
A well-known conjecture states that the Whitney numbers of the second kind of a geometric lattice (simple matroid) are logarithmically concave. We show this conjecture to be equivalent to proving an upper bound on the number of new copoints…
We study a class of planar billiards having the remarkable property that their phase space consists up to a set of zero measure of two invariant sets formed by orbits moving in opposite directions. The tables of these billiards are tubular…
We consider the class of dispersing billiard systems in the plane formed by removing three convex analytic scatterers satisfying the non-eclipse condition. The collision map in this system is conjugated to a subshift, providing a natural…
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…
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…
We study the Hadamard product of the linear forms defining a hyperplane arrangement with those of its dual, which we view as generating an ideal in a certain polynomial ring. We use this ideal, which we call the ideal of pairs, to study…
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…
In this work, we introduce a novel concept of magic billiards, which can be seen as an umbrella, unifying several well-known generalisations of mathematical billiards. We analyse properties of magic billiards in the case of elliptical…
E. Gutkin found a remarkable class of convex billiard tables in the plane which have a constant angle invariant curve. In this paper we prove that in dimension 3 only round sphere has such a property. For dimension greater than 3 it must be…
I describe work in progress with Baryshnikov and Zharnitsky on periodic billiard orbits that leads one to an exterior differential system (EDS). I then give a brief introduction to EDS illustrated by several examples.
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…
In this text we study billiards on ovals and investigate some consequences of a rotational symmetry of the boundary on the dynamics. As it simplifies some calculations, the symmetry helps to obtain the results. We focus on periodic orbits…