Related papers: Totally integrable symplectic billiards are ellips…
In this paper we study the ergodic properties of mathematical billiards describing the uniform motion of a point in a flat torus from which finitely many, pairwise disjoint, tubular neighborhoods of translated subtori (the so called…
In this note we study caustic-free regions for convex billiard tables in the hyperbolic plane or the hemisphere. In particular, following a result by Gutkin and Katok in the Euclidean case, we estimate the size of such regions in terms of…
Let x and y be points in a billiard table M that is bounded by a curve sigma. We assume that sigma is a simple closed C^r curve with positive curvature, where r is at least 2. A subset B of M\{x,y} is called a blocking set for the pair…
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…
The billiard in an ellipse has an integral linear in momentum, the Joachimsthal integral. We show that the existence of such an integral characterizes conics. We extend this result to the spherical and hyperbolic geometries and to higher…
Billiards tables - a minimal model for particles moving in a confined region - are known to present classical (and quantum) different features according to their shape, ranging from strongly chaotic to integrable dynamics. Here we consider…
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 study polygonal billiards with reflection laws contracting the reflected angle towards the normal. It is shown that if a polygon does not have parallel sides facing each other, then the corresponding billiard map has finitely many…
We study the dynamics of dissipative billiard maps within planar convex domains. Such maps have a global attractor. We are interested in the topological and dynamical complexity of the attractor, in terms both of the geometry of the…
In this article we introduce a simple dynamical system called symplectic billiards. As opposed to usual/Birkhoff billiards, where length is the generating function, for symplectic billiards symplectic area is the generating function. We…
We study non-Birkhoff periodic orbits in symmetric convex planar billiards. Our main result provides a quantitative criterion for the existence of such orbits with prescribed minimal period, rotation number, and spatiotemporal symmetry. We…
We study symplectic embeddings of ellipsoids into balls. In the main construction, we show that a given embedding of 2m-dimensional ellipsoids can be suspended to embeddings of ellipsoids in any higher dimension. In dimension 6,s if the…
We consider a remarkable $C^2$-smooth billiard table introduced by Hans L.Fetter. It is obtained by the string construction from a regular hexagon for a special value of the length of the string. It was suggested as a possible…
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…
This paper deals with the so-called Boltzmann billiard, that is, a billiard subjected to a central force of the type $V(r)=-\alpha/r-\beta/r^2$, $\alpha$ and $\beta$ being positive constants, and with a straight reflection table. In the…
In this paper we give a classification of tilings of the sphere by congruent quadrilaterals with exactly two equal edges. The tilings are the earth map tilings, $(p,q)$-earth map tilings and their flip modifications, and quadrilateral…
We study billiards on polytopes in $\Rr^d$ with contracting reflection laws, i.e. non-standard reflection laws that contract the reflection angle towards the normal. We prove that billiards on generic polytopes are uniformly hyperbolic…
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…
Let $q \ge 3$ be a period. There are at least two $(1,q)$-periodic trajectories inside any smooth strictly convex billiard table, and all of them have the same length when the table is an ellipse or a circle. We quantify the chaotic…
In [AMW], it is proved that if a compact $3$-manifold has positive Ricci curvature and strictly convex boundary, then this manifold is diffeomorphic to the standard $3$-dimensional Euclidean disk. In this paper, we prove its…