Related papers: Billiards in right triangles and orbit closures in…
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…
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 provide a method to straighten each billiard trajectory in a flat disk. As an application, we show that for each point on the disk and for almost all directions, the closure of the corresponding billiard trajectory contains a vertex. We…
The principal angles between binary collision subspaces in an $N$-billiard system in $d$-dimensional Euclidean space are computed. These angles are computed for equal masses and arbitrary masses. We then provide a bound on the number of…
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 introduce a new method for estimating the growth of various quantities arising in dynamical systems. We apply our method to polygonal billiards on surfaces of constant curvature. For instance, we obtain power bounds of degree two plus…
We consider a billiard problem for compact domains bounded by confocal conics on a hyperboloid of one sheet in the Minkowski space. We show that there are two types of confocal families in such setting. Using an algebro-geometric…
A study of the quantum triangular billiard requires consideration of a boundary value problem for the Green's function of the Laplacian on a trianglar domain. Our main result is a reformulation of this problem in terms of coupled…
Starting from any given rational-sided, right triangle, for example the $(3,4,5)$-triangle with area $6$, we use Euclidean geometry to show that there are infinitely many other rational-sided, right triangles of the same area. We show…
We apply periodic orbit theory to a two-dimensional non-integrable billiard system whose boundary is varied smoothly from a circular to an equilateral triangular shape. Although the classical dynamics becomes chaotic with increasing…
We consider the class of dispersing billiard systems in the plane formed by removing three convex analytic scatterers satisfying the non-eclipse condition. The collision map in this system is conjugated to a subshift, providing a natural…
While billiard systems of various shapes have been used as paradigmatic model systems in the fields of nonlinear dynamics and quantum chaos, few studies have investigated anisotropic billiards. Motivated by the tremendous advances in using…
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…
We investigate chaotic scattering on an attractive step potential with a quadrupolar deformation. The phase space features of the bound billiard are studied by using the notion of symmetry lines to find periodic orbits. We show that the…
Weyl's expansion for the asymptotic mode density of billiards consists of the area, length, curvature and corner terms. The area term has been associated with the so-called zero-length orbits. Here closed nonperiodic paths corresponding to…
The adjoint action of a finite group of Lie type on its Lie algebra is studied. A simple formula is conjectured for the number of split semisimple orbits of a given genus. This conjecture is proved for type A, and partial results are…
We consider two nested billiards in $\mathbb R^d$, $d\geq3$, with $C^2$-smooth strictly convex boundaries. We prove that if the corresponding actions by reflections on the space of oriented lines commute, then the billiards are confocal…
Dynamical billiards, or the behavior of a particle traveling in a planar region $D$ undergoing elastic collisions with the boundary, has been extensively studied and is used to model many physical phenomena such as a Boltzmann gas. Of…
We present numerical evidence which strongly suggests that irrational triangular billiards (all angles irrational with $\pi$) are mixing. Since these systems are known to have zero Kolmogorov-Sinai entropy, they may play an important role…
The bounce spectrum of a polygonal billiard table is the collection of all bi-infinite sequences of edge labels corresponding to billiard trajectories on the table. We give methods for reconstructing from the bounce spectrum of a polygonal…