Related papers: Thesis manuscript: Projective and complex billiard…
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…
We identify a collection of periodic billiard orbits in a self-similar Sierpinski carpet billiard table. Based on a refinement of the result of Durand-Cartagena and Tyson regarding nontrivial line segments in a self-similar Sierpinski…
We derive semiclassical contributions of periodic orbits from a boundary integral equation for three-dimensional billiard systems. We use an iterative method that keeps track of the composition of the stability matrix and the Maslov index…
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…
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…
We consider classical dynamical properties of a particle in a constant gravitational force and making specular reflections with circular, elliptic or oval boundaries. The model and collision map are described and a detailed study of the…
Outer billiards is a simple dynamical system based on a convex planar shape. The Moser-Neumann question, first posed by B.H. Neumann around 1960, asks if there exists a planar shape for which outer billiards has an unbounded orbit. The…
Gravitational billiards provide an experimentally accessible arena for testing formulations of nonlinear dynamics. We present a mathematical model that captures the essential dynamics required for describing the motion of a realistic…
We study a class of elliptic billiards with a Keplerian potential inside, considering two cases: a reflective one, where the particle reflects elastically on the boundary, and a refractive one, where the particle can cross the billiard's…
We study analytically and numerically the classical diffusive process which takes place in a chaotic billiard. This allows to estimate the conditions under which the statistical properties of eigenvalues and eigenfunctions can be described…
Revised version: some minor errors and typos fixed; exposition watered. Abstract: To a trajectory of a billiard in parallelogram we assign its symbolic trajectory - the sequence of numbers of coordinate plane, to which the faces met by the…
In our recent paper, we studied periodic billiard trajectories in the regular pentagon and closed geodesic on the double pentagon, a translation surface of genus two. In particular, we made a number of conjectures concerning symbolic…
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 consider a multi-dimensional billiard system in an (n+1)-dimensional Euclidean space, the direct product of the "horizontal" hyperplane and the "vertical" line. The hypersurface that determines the system is assumed to be smooth and…
We consider the Boltzmann system corresponding to the motion of a billiard with a linear boundary under the influence of a gravitational field. We derive analytic conditions of Cayley's type for periodicity of its trajectories and provide…
We introduce a class of convex, higher-dimensional billiard models which generalise stadium billiards. These models correspond to the free motion of a point-particle in a region bounded by cylinders cut by planes. They are motivated by…
We demonstrate that the free motion of any two-dimensional rigid body colliding elastically with two parallel, flat walls is equivalent to a billiard system. Using this equivalence, we analyze the integrable and chaotic properties of this…
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…
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…
In this paper we introduce a new dynamical system which we call Angular billiard. It acts on the exterior points of a convex curve in Euclidean plane. In a neighborhood of the boundary curve this system turns out to be dual to the Birkhoff…