Related papers: Gravitational billiards -- bouncing inside a parab…
All the segments (or their continuations) of a billiard trajectory inside an ellipsoid of $\Rset^n$ are tangent to n-1 quadrics of the pencil of confocal quadrics determined by the ellipsoid. The quadrics associated to periodic billiard…
We study the deep interplay between geometry of quadrics in d-dimensional space and the dynamics of related integrable billiard systems. Various generalizations of Poncelet theorem are reviewed. The corresponding analytic conditions of…
We consider the following problem: given two parallel and identically oriented bundles of light rays in n-dimensional Euclidean space and given a diffeomorphism between the rays of the former bundle and the rays of the latter one, is it…
We give an optical physicist view of the problem of the trajectories in a polygonal billiard using only basic facts of Optics and the theory of functions of a complex variable. This approach allow us to stablish a certain correspondence…
In a set of experiments, Couder et. al. demonstrate that an oscillating fluid bed may propagate a bouncing droplet through the guidance of the surface waves. We present a dynamical systems model, in the form of an iterative map, for a…
The two-body problem is extensively studied in open systems and asymptotically flat spacetimes. However, there are many systems where radiation is trapped: they range from radiating charges in cavities to low-energy excitations of massive…
An extraordinary focusing property of a parabolic mirror for ultracold neutrons in the presence of the gravitational field was first reported by A. Steyerl and co-authors. It was shown that all neutrons emitted from the focus of the mirror…
We study the formation of images in a reflective sphere in three configurations using caustics of the field of light rays. The optical wavefront emerging from a source point reaching a subject following passage through the optical system…
The question of invisibility for bodies with mirror surface is studied in the framework of geometrical optics. We construct bodies that are invisible/have zero resistance in two mutually orthogonal directions, and prove that there do not…
In an ordinary billiard system trajectories of a Hamiltonian system are elastically reflected after a collision with a hypersurface (scatterer). If the scatterer is a submanifold of codimension more than one, we say that the billiard is…
We show that the complexity of the billiard in a typical polygon grows cubically and the number of saddle connections grows quadratically along certain subsequences. It is known that the set of points whose first n-bounces hits the same…
We investigate a rotated, orthogonal gravitational wedge billiard - a special case of the asymmetric wedge billiard - in which the dynamics are integrable. We derive equations and conditions under which periodic orbits may be constructed…
We consider a Kepler billiard with zero-energy in the plane defined inside a smooth closed connected simple curve which intersects all focused parabola at at most two points. {We show that} if has an invariant curve consisting of…
We discuss the boundary of the spacetime region through each point of which a trapped surface passes, first in some simple soluble examples, and then in the self-similar Vaidya solution. For the latter the boundary must lie strictly inside…
We characterize fundamental domains of affine reflection groups as those polyhedral convex bodies which support a continuous billiard dynamics. We interpret this characterization in the broader context of Alexandrov geometry and prove an…
The aim of this manuscript is to obtain rigidity and non-existence results for parabolic spacelike submanifolds with causal mean curvature vector field in orthogonally splitted spacetimes, and in particular, in globally hyperbolic…
The billiard flow in a planar domain acts on its tangent bundle as geodesic flow with reflections from the boundary. Its trivial first integral is the squared velocity. Bolotin's Conjecture, now a joint theorem of Bialy, Mironov and the…
The renowned Fagnano problem asks for the inscribed triangle of minimal perimeter within a given reference triangle. Equivalently, it seeks a billiard trajectory inside the triangle that closes after three reflections. In this note, we…
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…
Within classical optics, one may add microscopic "roughness" to a macroscopically flat mirror so that parallel rays of a given angle are reflected at different outgoing angles. Taking the limit (as the roughness becomes increasingly…