Related papers: On projective billiards with open subsets of trian…

Astute variations in the geometry of mathematical billiard tables have been and continue to be a source of understanding their wide range of dynamical behaviors, from regular to chaotic. Viewing standard specular billiards in the broader…

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…

We propose geometric tools that are suitable for studying the behavior of a billiard trajectory in a homogeneous force field. Two examples are considered: a vertical plane with an open top and with a parabolic or right angle boundary at the…

We investigate the dynamics of no-slip billiards, a model in which small rotating disks may exchange linear and angular momentum at collisions with the boundary. We give new results on periodicity and boundedness of orbits which suggest…

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…

The purpose of this paper is to compare a classical non-holonomic system---a sphere rolling against the inner surface of a vertical cylinder under gravity---and a class of discrete dynamical systems known as no-slip billiards in similar…

A planar dual billiard is a planar curve $\gamma$ equipped with a family $(\sigma_P)|_{P\in\gamma}$ of projective involutions of the projective lines $L_P$ tangent to $\gamma$ at $P$ that fix $P$. A dual billiard is called rationally…

Consider billiard dynamics in a strictly convex domain, and consider a trajectory that begins with the velocity vector making a small positive angle with the boundary. Lazutkin proved that in two dimensions, it is impossible for this angle…

We consider 3-periodic orbits in an elliptic billiard. Numerical experiments conducted by Dan Reznik have shown that the locus of the centers of inscribed circles of the corresponding triangles is an ellipse. We prove this fact by the…

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…

The article studies a generalization of the elliptic billiard to the complex domain. We show that the billiard orbits also have caustics, and that the number of such caustics is bigger than for the real case. For example, for a given…

Cosmological billiards arise as a map of the solution of the Einstein equations, when the most general symmetry for the metric tensor is hypothesized, and points are considered as spatially decoupled in the asymptotic limit towards the…

In the present note, we uncover a remarkable connection between the length of periodic orbit of a classical particle enclosed in a class of 2-dimensional planar billiards and the energy of a quantum particle confined to move in an identical…

For every quadrilateral sufficiently close to a rectangle, we shall show that it possess a periodic billiard path. This is an REU work done at ICERM in Summer 2012.

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…

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 show that there exists a $C^2$ open dense set of convex bodies with smooth boundary whose billiard map exhibits a non-trivial hyperbolic basic set. As a consequence billiards in generic convex bodies have positive topological entropy and…

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 study the classical and quantum mechanics of a three-dimensional stadium billiard. It consists of two quarter cylinders that are rotated with respect to each other by 90 degrees, and it is classically chaotic. The billiard exhibits only…

In this paper, we attempt to define and understand the orbits of the Koch snowflake fractal billiard $KS$. This is a priori a very difficult problem because $\partial(KS)$, the snowflake curve boundary of $KS$, is nowhere differentiable,…