Related papers: Long Hitting time for translation flows and L-shap…

In a minimal flow, the hitting time is the exponent of the power law, as r goes to zero, for the time needed by orbits to become r-dense. We show that on the so-called Ornithorynque origami the hitting time of the flow in an irrational…

We offer some theorems, mainly of finiteness, for certain patterns in elliptical billiards, related to periodic trajectories. For instance, if two players hit a ball at a given position and with directions forming a fixed angle in…

Let $\tau_r(x,x_0)$ be the time needed for a point $x$ to enter for the first time in a ball $B_r(x_0)$ centered in $x_0$, with small radius $r$. We construct a class of translations on the two torus having particular arithmetic properties…

Consider shuffling a deck of $n$ cards, labeled $1$ through $n$, as follows: at each time step, pick one card uniformly with your right hand and another card, independently and uniformly with your left hand; then swap the cards. How long…

We develop a framework for dealing with smooth approximations to billiards with corners in the two-dimensional setting. Let a polygonal trajectory in a billiard start and end up at the same billiard's corner point. We prove that smooth…

We prove that a bounded domain $\Omega$ in $\R^n$ with smooth boundary has a periodic billiard trajectory with at most $n+1$ bounce times and of length less than $C_n r(\Omega)$, where $C_n$ is a positive constant which depends only on $n$,…

We study a diophantine property for translation surfaces, defined in term of saddle connections and inspired by the classical theorem of Khinchin. We prove that the same dichotomy holds as in Khinchin' result, then we deduce a sharp…

We prove a new result in the area of hitting time statistics. Currently, there is a lot of papers showing that the first entry times into cylinders or balls are often faster than the Birkhoff's Ergodic Theorem would suggest. We provide an…

Rigid bodies collision maps in dimension two, under a natural set of physical requirements, can be classified into two types: the standard specular reflection map and a second which we call, after Broomhead and Gutkin, no-slip. This leads…

We study periodic wind-tree models, billiards in the plane endowed with $\mathbb{Z}^2$-periodically located identical connected symmetric right-angled obstacles. We exhibit effective asymptotic formulas for the number of (isotopy classes…

Traditionally, rotation numbers for toroidal billiard flows are defined as the limiting vectors of average displacements per time on trajectory segments. Naturally, these creatures are living in the (commutative) vector space $\real^n$, if…

We consider travelling times of billiard trajectories in the exterior of an obstacle K on a two-dimensional Riemannian manifold M. We prove that given two obstacles with almost the same travelling times, the generalised geodesic flows on…

We consider Teichm\"uller geodesics in strata of translation surfaces. We prove lower and upper bounds for the Hausdorff dimension of the set of parameters generating a geodesic bounded in some compact part of the stratum. Then we compute…

We discuss zeta functions, and traces of the associated weighted evolution operators for intermittent Hamiltonian systems in general and for the Sinai billiard in particular. The intermittency of this billiard is utilized so that the zeta…

For a given rotation number we compute the Hausdorff dimension of the set of well approximable numbers. We use this result and an inhomogeneous version of Jarnik's theorem to show strong recurrence properties of the billiard flow in certain…

A planar polygonal billiard $\P$ is said to have the finite blocking property if for every pair $(O,A)$ of points in $\P$ there exists a finite number of ``blocking'' points $B_1, ..., B_n$ such that every billiard trajectory from $O$ to…

To illustrate the general results of the previous paper, we discuss here a large concrete example of the orbifold-string theories of permutation-type. For each of the many subexamples, we focus on evaluation of the \emph{target space-time…

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…

We study the homotopical rotation vectors and the homotopical rotation sets for the billiard flow on the unit flat torus with two, disjoint and orthogonal cylindrical scatterers removed from it. The natural habitat for these objects is the…

We remove a small disc from the flat two-dimensional torus and consider a point-like particle that starts moving from the center of the disc with linear trajectory. We provide asymptotic estimates for the moments of the first exit time,…