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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 introduce a new discrete system that arises from ellipsoidal billiards and is closely related to the double reflection nets. The system is defined on the lattice of a uniform honeycomb consisting of rectified hypercubes and cross…
We study the dynamics of billiard models with a modified collision rule: the outgoing angle from a collision is a uniform contraction, by a factor lambda, of the incident angle. These pinball billiards interpolate between a one-dimensional…
We consider classical billiards on surfaces of constant curvature, where the charged billiard ball is exposed to a homogeneous, stationary magnetic field perpendicular to the surface. We establish sufficient conditions for hyperbolicity of…
We consider billiard systems within compact domains bounded by confocal conics on a hyperboloid of one sheet in the Minkowski space. We derive conditions for elliptic periodicity for such billiards. We describe the topology of those…
Billiards are flat cavities where a particle is free to move between elastic collisions with the boundary. In chaos theory these systems are simple prototypes, their conservative dynamics of a billiard may vary from regular to chaotic,…
Billiards in ellipses have a confocal ellipse or hyperbola as caustic. The goal of this paper is to prove that for each billiard of one type there exists an isometric counterpart of the other type. Isometry means here that the lengths of…
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…
Let $T\subset \R^{m+1}$ be a strictly convex domain bounded by a smooth hypersurface $X=\partial T$. In this paper we find lower bounds on the number of billiard trajectories in $T$ which have a prescribed intial point $A\in X$, a…
We consider the set of polygons all of whose sides are vertical or horizontal with fixed combinatorics (for example all the figure "L"s). We show that there is a dense G $\delta$ subset of such polygons such that for each polygon in this G…
A billiard is a dynamical system in which a particle alternates between motion in a straight line and specular reflection from a boundary. For billiards in non-convex areas bounded by segments of confocal quadrics are studied. The topology…
The billiard table is modeled as an $n$-dimensional box $[0,a_1]\times [0,a_2]\times \ldots \times [0,a_n] \subset \mathbb{R}^n$, with each side having real-valued lengths $a_i$ that are pairwise commensurable. A ball is launched from the…
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…
In standard (mathematical) billiards a point particle moves uniformly in a billiard table with elastic reflections off the boundary. We show that in transition from mathematical billiards to physical billiards, where a finite size hard…
The stable and unstable manifolds of an invariant set of a piecewise-smooth map are themselves piecewise-smooth. Consequently, as parameters of a piecewise-smooth map are varied, an invariant set can develop a homoclinic connection when its…
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…
We study billiard dynamics inside an ellipse for which the axes lengths are changed periodically in time and an $O(\delta)$-small quartic polynomial deformation is added to the boundary. In this situation the energy of the particle in the…
Let $f: M \to M$ denote a diffeomorphism of a smooth manifold $M$. Let $p$ in $M$ be its hyperbolic fixed point with stable and unstable manifolds $W_S$ and $W_U$, respectively. Assume that $W_S$ is a curve. Suppose that $W_U$ and $W_S$…
We establish a relation between the growth of the cylindrical contact homology of a contact manifold and the topological entropy of Reeb flows on this manifold. We show that if a contact manifold $(M,\xi)$ admits a hypertight contact form…
Let $f: [0, +\infty) \to (0, +\infty)$ be a sufficiently smooth convex function, vanishing at infinity. Consider the planar domain $Q$ delimited by the positive $x$-semiaxis, the positive $y$-semiaxis, and the graph of $f$. Under certain…