Related papers: On the complexity of polygonal billiards

We study length-minimizing closed generalized Euclidean billiard trajectories in convex bodies in $\mathbb{R}^n$ and investigate their relation to the inclusion minimal affine sections that contain these trajectories. We show that when…

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…

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 offer some theorems, mainly of finiteness, for certain patterns in elliptical billiards, related to periodic trajectories. For instance, if two players hit a ball at a given position and with directions forming a fixed angle in…

For every quadrilateral sufficiently close to a rectangle, we shall show that it possess a periodic billiard path. This is an REU work done at ICERM in Summer 2012.

We introduce a new notion of stability for periodic orbits in polygonal billiards. We say that a periodic orbit of a polygonal billiard is $\lambda$-stable if there is a periodic orbit for the corresponding pinball billiard which converges…

We study combinatorics of billiard partitions which arose recently in the description of periodic trajectories of ellipsoidal billiards in d-dimensional Euclidean and pseudo-Euclidean spaces. Such partitions uniquely codify the sets of…

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…

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…

Given a domain or, more generally, a Riemannian manifold with boundary, a billiard is the motion of a particle when the field of force is absent. Trajectories of such a motion are geodesics inside the domain; and the particle reflects from…

In a hyperbolic polygon any finite collection of closed billiard trajectories can be assigned an average length function. In this paper, we consider the average length of the collection of cyclically related closed billiard trajectories in…

The purpose of this paper is to study the dynamics of a square billiard with a non-standard reflection law such that the angle of reflection of the particle is a linear contraction of the angle of incidence. We present numerical and…

In this paper we show that, under certain generic conditions, billiards on ovals have only a finite number of periodic orbits, for each period, all non-degenerate and at least one of them is hyperbolic. Moreover, the invariant curves of two…

The periodic orbits of the strongly chaotic cardioid billiard are studied by introducing a binary symbolic dynamics. The corresponding partition is mapped to a topological well-ordered symbol plane. In the symbol plane the pruning front is…

We investigate the dynamics of no-slip billiards, a model in which small rotating disks may exchange linear and angular momentum at collisions with the boundary. We give new results on periodicity and boundedness of orbits which suggest…

We present some foundational results about the outer length billiard system, including its generating function and the invariant area form. We describe the limiting behavior of the orbits far away from the billiard table: the orbits of the…

In this note we establish the existence of a (n+1)-periodic billiard trajectory inside an n-dimensional regular simplex in the hyperbolic space, which hits the interior of every facet exactly once.

Systems of pinned billiard balls serve as simplified models of collisions, where all particles remain fixed in their positions while their (pseudo-)velocities evolve in accordance with the laws of conservation of energy and momentum. For…

In this work we address the question of proving the stability of elliptic 2-periodic orbits for strictly convex billiards. Eventhough it is part of a widely accepted belief that ellipticity implies stability, classical theorems show that…

We study outer length billiards; our main results are as follows. We prove 3- and 4-periodic versions of the Ivrii conjecture. We show that, for every period $n\ge 3$, there exists a functional space of billiard tables that possess…