Related papers: Illumination in Rational Billiards
The billiard problem concerns a point particle moving freely in a region of the horizontal plane bounded by a closed curve $\Gamma$, and reflected at each impact with $\Gamma$. The region is called a `billiard', and the reflections are…
In this paper we investigate the existence of closed billiard trajectories in not necessarily smooth convex bodies. In particular, we show that if a body $K\subset \mathbb{R}^d$ has the property that the tangent cone of every non-smooth…
We show that the complexity of the billiard in a typical polygon grows cubically and the number of saddle connections grows quadratically along certain subsequences. It is known that the set of points whose first n-bounces hits the same…
We study periodic infinite billiards in the plane. We show that for rational models, some particular obstacles can be added periodically, so that the billiard flow in the resulting table is recurrent in almost every direction.
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…
This paper investigates the dynamics of optical billiards, a generalization of classic billiards, where light rays travel within a refractive medium and reflect elastically at the boundary. Inspired by studies of acoustic modes in rapidly…
A nice trick for studying the billiard flow in a rational polygon is to unfold the polygon along the trajectories. This gives rise to a translation or half-translation surface tiled by the original polygon, or equivalently an Abelian or…
We introduce the iteration theory for periodic billiard trajectories in a compact and convex domain of the Euclidean space, and we apply it to establish a multiplicity result for non-iterated trajectories.
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…
We consider the set of polygons all of whose sides are vertical or horizontal with fixed combinatorics (for example all the figure "L"s). We show that there is a dense G $\delta$ subset of such polygons such that for each polygon in this G…
We prove some partial results on the periodicity of billiard systems on graphs. The results specialize to the case of $n$ billiards with equal mass on the unit interval or circle traveling at the same speed.
We introduce symplectic billiards for pairs of possibly non-convex polygons. After establishing basic properties, we give several criteria on pairs of polygons for the symplectic billiard map to be fully periodic, i.e. $\textit{every}$…
Billiards in ellipses have a confocal ellipse or hyperbola as caustic. The goal of this paper is to prove that for each billiard of one type there exists an isometric counterpart of the other type. Isometry means here that the lengths of…
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…
Over the course of studying billiard dynamics, several questions were raised. One of the questions was, which surfaces satisfy the following property (which is called Veech's dichotomy): Any direction is either completely periodic or…
We show that in the space of all convex billiard boundaries, the set of boundaries with rational caustics is dense. More precisely, the set of billiard boundaries with caustics of rotation number $1/q$ is polynomial sense in the smooth…
The multidimensional cosmological model describing the evolution of $n$ Einstein spaces in the presence of multicomponent perfect fluid is considered. When certain restrictions on the parameters of the model are imposed, the dynamics of the…
The goal of this paper is an analysis of the geometry of billiards in ellipses, based on properties of confocal central conics. The extended sides of the billiards meet at points which are located on confocal ellipses and hyperbolas. They…
The connected configuration space of a so called cylindric billiard system is a flat torus minus finitely many spherical cylinders. The dynamical system describes the uniform motion of a point particle in this configuration space with…
We give topological lower bounds on the number of periodic and closed trajectories in strictly convex smooth billiards. We use variational reduction admitting a finite group of symmetries and apply topological approach based on equivariant…