Related papers: Wire billiards, the first steps
A caustic of a billiard is a curve whose tangent lines are reflected to its own tangent lines. A billiard is called Birkhoff caustic-integrable, if there exists a topological annulus adjacent to its boundary from inside that is foliated by…
We generalize the following simple geometric fact: the only centrally symmetric convex curve of constant width is a circle. Billiard interpretation of the condition of constant width reads: a planar curve has constant width, if and only if,…
A caustic of a strictly convex planar bounded billiard is a smooth curve whose tangent lines are reflected from the billiard boundary to its tangent lines. The famous Birkhoff Conjecture states that if the billiard boundary has an inner…
Caustics are curves with the property that a billiard trajectory, once tangent to it, stays tangent after every reflection at the boundary of the billiard table. When the billiard table is an ellipse, any nonsingular billiard trajectory has…
From a geometric viewpoint, billiard trajectories and geodesics are related by mutual approximation results. In one direction, it is known that every geodesic curve in the boundary of a smooth convex body can be approximated by a sequence…
Reflection in strictly convex bounded planar billiard acts on the space of oriented lines and preserves a standard area form. A caustic is a curve $C$ whose tangent lines are reflected by the billiard to lines tangent to $C$. The famous…
In this paper we prove the Birkhoff-Poritsky conjecture for centrally-symmetric $C^2$-smooth convex planar billiards. We assume that the domain $\mathcal A$ between the invariant curve of $4$-periodic orbits and the boundary of the phase…
We consider billiard ball motion in a convex domain of a constant curvature surface influenced by the constant magnetic field. We prove that if the billiard map is totally integrable then the boundary curve is necessarily a circle. This…
In this paper we define and study the billiard problem on bounded regions on surfaces of constant curvature. We show that this problem defines a 2-dimensional conservative and reversible dynamical system, defined by a Twist diffeomorphism,…
A hard-wall billiard is a mathematical model describing the confinement of a free particle that collides specularly and instantaneously with boundaries and discontinuities. Soft billiards are a generalization that includes a smooth boundary…
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…
The paper establishes the property of splittability of billiard boundary sequences in n dimensional cube into subsequences of fractional parts. This reveals a new property of integrable and weak perturbated Hamilton systems: under a simple…
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…
In view of classical results of Masur and Veech almost every element in the moduli space of compact translation surfaces is recurrent. In this paper we focus on the problem of recurrence for elements of smooth curves in the moduli space. We…
We consider classical billiards in plane, connected, but not necessarily bounded domains. The charged billiard ball is immersed in a homogeneous, stationary magnetic field perpendicular to the plane. The part of dynamics which is not…
We show that two-dimensional billiard systems are Turing complete, in the sense that the halting of any Turing machine with a given input is equivalent to a certain bounded trajectory in this system entering a specified open set. Billiards…
Given a random map (T_1, T_2, T_3, T_4, p_1, p_2, p_3, p_4), we define a random billiard map on a surface of constant curvature (Euclidean plane, hyperbolic plane, or the sphere). The Liouville measure is invariant for this billiard map.…
In the present paper we introduce a new generating function for outer billiards in the plane. Using this generating function, we prove the following rigidity result: if the vicinity of the smooth convex plane curve $\gamma$ of positive…
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 give a beautiful explicit example of a convex plane curve such that the outer billiard has a given finite number of invariant curves. Moreover, the dynamics on these curves is a standard shift. This example can be considered as an outer…