Related papers: Illumination in Rational Billiards
We introduce a new equivalence relation on the set of all polygonal billiards. We say that two billiards (or polygons) are order equivalent if each of the billiards has an orbit whose footpoints are dense in the boundary and the two…
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 illumination problem is a popular topic in recreational mathematics: In a mirrored room, is every region illuminable from every point in the region? So-called \enquote{unilluminable rooms} are related to \enquote{trapped sets} in…
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:…
Mathematical billiards is much like the real game: a point mass, representing the ball, rolls in a straight line on a (perfectly friction-less) table, striking the sides according to the law of reflection. A billiard trajectory is then…
We prove Poisson limit laws for open billiards where the holes are on the boundaries of billiard tables (rather than some abstract holes in the phase space of a billiard). Such holes are of the main interest for billiard systems, especially…
Several examples of pairs of isospectral planar domains have been produced in the two-dimensional Euclidean space by various methods. We show that all these examples rely on the symmetry between points and blocks in finite projective…
We construct semi-infinite billiard domains which reverse the direction of most incoming particles. We prove that almost all particles will leave the open billiard domain after a finite number of reflections. Moreover, with high probability…
We show that wave functions in planar rational polygonal billiards (all angles rationally related to Pi) can be expanded in a basis of quasi-stationary and spatially regular states. Unlike the energy eigenstates, these states are directly…
We give a new proof for the directional billiard complexity in the cube, which was conjectured in \cite{Ra} and proven in \cite{Ar.Ma.Sh.Ta}. Our technique gives us a similar theorem for some rational polyhedra.
In this article we study the dynamics of one-dimensional relativistic billiards containing particles with positive and negative energy. We study configurations with two identical positive masses and symmetric positions with two massless…
Let $T\subset \R^{m+1}$ be a strictly convex domain bounded by a smooth hypersurface $X=\partial T$. In this paper we find lower bounds on the number of billiard trajectories in $T$ which have a prescribed intial point $A\in X$, a…
Let x and y be points in a billiard table M that is bounded by a curve sigma. We assume that sigma is a simple closed C^r curve with positive curvature, where r is at least 2. A subset B of M\{x,y} is called a blocking set for the pair…
In this paper we study the ergodic properties of mathematical billiards describing the uniform motion of a point in a flat torus from which finitely many, pairwise disjoint, tubular neighborhoods of translated subtori (the so called…
We show that every GL(2, R) orbit closure of translation surfaces is either a connected component of a stratum, the hyperelliptic locus, or consists entirely of surfaces whose Jacobians have extra endomorphisms. We use this result to give…
We investigate the rotation sets of open billiards in $\mathbb{R}^N$ for the natural observable related to a starting point of a given billiard trajectory. We prove that the general rotation set is convex and the set of all convex…
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…
In this paper we establish a kind of bijection between the orbits of a polygonal outer billiards system and the orbits of a related (and simpler to analyze) system called the pinwheel map. One consequence of the result is that the outer…
Rational polygonal billiards are one of the key models among the larger class of pseudo-integrable billiards. Their billiard flow may be lifted to the geodesic flow on a translation surface. Whereas such classical billiards have been much…
We illustrate the theory of one-dimensional pluri-Lagrangian systems with the example of commuting billiard maps in confocal quadrics.