Related papers: Illumination in Rational Billiards

We give a criterion which allows to prove non-ergodicity for certain infinite periodic billiards and directional flows on Z-periodic translation surfaces. Our criterion applies in particular to a billiard in an infinite band with…

We consider billiards obtained by removing from the plane finitely many strictly convex analytic obstacles satisfying the non-eclipse condition. The restriction of the dynamics to the set of non-escaping orbits is conjugated to a subshift,…

We consider billiard ball motion in a convex domain of the Euclidean plane bounded by a piece-wise smooth curve influenced by the constant magnetic field. We show that if there exists a polynomial in velocities integral of the magnetic…

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…

In the moduli space of quadratic differentials over complex structures on a surface, we construct a set of full Hausdorff dimension of points with bounded Teichm\"uller geodesic trajectories.The main tool is quantitative nondivergence of…

This short expository note gives an elementary introduction to the study of dynamics on certain moduli spaces, and in particular the recent breakthrough result of Eskin, Mirzakhani, and Mohammadi. We also discuss the context and…

Given a (simple) grid polygon $P$ in a grid of equilateral triangles, Defant and Jiradilok considered a billiards system where beams of light bounce around inside of $P$. We study the relationship between the perimeter…

The standard Wojtkowski-Markarian-Donnay-Bunimovich technique for the hyperbolicity of focusing or mixed billiards in the plane requires the diameter of a billiard table to be of the same order as the largest ray of curvature along the…

I announce a solution of the conjecture about the measure of periodic points for planar billiard tables. The theorem says that if $\Om\subset\R^2$ is a compact domain with piecewise $C^3$ boundary, then the set of periodic orbits for the…

We study outer length billiards; our main results are as follows. We prove 3- and 4-periodic versions of the Ivrii conjecture. We show that, for every period $n\ge 3$, there exists a functional space of billiard tables that possess…

It is well-known that billiards in polygons cannot be chaotic (hyperbolic). Particularly Kolmogorov-Sinai entropy of any polygonal billiard is zero. We consider physical polygonal billiards where a moving particle is a hard disc rather than…

We use Ratner's theorem to compute the asymptotics of the number of (cylinders of) periodic trajectories in a rectangle with a barrier, assuming that the location p/q of the barrier is rational. We also show that as q tends to infinity, the…

We exhibit a subset of a finite Abelian group, which tiles the group by translation, and such that its tiling complements do not have a common spectrum (orthogonal basis for their $L^2$ space consisting of group characters). This disproves…

We consider the integrable dynamics of a Kepler billiard in the plane bounded by a branch of a conic section focused at the Kepler center. We show that in this case, for non-zero-energy orbits, the lines of consecutive second orbital foci…

All the segments (or their continuations) of a billiard trajectory inside an ellipsoid of $\Rset^n$ are tangent to n-1 quadrics of the pencil of confocal quadrics determined by the ellipsoid. The quadrics associated to periodic billiard…

We show that for almost every $(P,\lambda)$ where $P$ is a convex polygon and $\lambda\in(0,1)$, the corresponding outer billiard about $P$ with contraction $\lambda$ is asymptotically periodic, i.e., has a finite number of periodic orbits…

We establish a connection between capillary floating in neutral equilibrium and the billiard ball problem. This allows us to reduce the question of floating in neutral equilibrium at any orientation with a prescribed contact angle for…

The conjugation problem for billiard maps conjectures that if two strictly convex billiards have conjugated billiard maps, the billiard tables must be homothetic to each other. We show that if two billiard maps are conjugated, the…

It is known that the dynamics of planar billiards satisfies strong mixing properties (e.g. exponential decay of correlations) provided that some expansion condition on unstable curves is satisfied. This condition has been shown to always…

The classical dynamics of the isotropic two-dimensional harmonic oscillator confined by an elliptic hard wall is discussed. The interplay between the harmonic potential with circular symmetry and the boundary with elliptical symmetry does…