Related papers: Bouncing Outer Billiards
We illustrate the theory of one-dimensional pluri-Lagrangian systems with the example of commuting billiard maps in confocal quadrics.
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…
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…
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…
This paper addresses the question of genericity of existence of elliptic islands for the billiard map associated to strictly convex closed curves. More precisely, we study 2-periodic orbits of billiards associated to C5 closed and strictly…
We indulge in what mathematicians call frivolous activities. In Arithmetic Billiards, a ball is bouncing around in a rectangle. In Parity Checkers we place checkers on a checkerboard under certain parity constraints. Both activities turn…
We investigate the rotation sets of billiards on the $m$-dimensional torus with one small convex obstacle and in the square with one small convex obstacle. In the first case the displacement function, whose averages we consider, measures…
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…
The class of 2-dimensional non-integrable flat dynamical systems has a rather extensive literature with many deep results, but the methods developed for this type of problems, both the traditional approach via Teichm\"{u}ller geometry and…
We rigorously investigate closed Minkowski/Finsler billiard trajectories on $n$-dimensional convex bodies. We outline the central properties in comparison and differentiation from the Euclidean special case and establish two main results…
Rigid bodies collision maps in dimension two, under a natural set of physical requirements, can be classified into two types: the standard specular reflection map and a second which we call, after Broomhead and Gutkin, no-slip. This leads…
A new algorithm for determining the eigenstates of n-dimensional billiards is presented. It is based on the application of the Cauchy theorem for the determination of the null space of the boundary overlap matrix. The method is free from…
We introduce a new family of billiards which break time reversal symmetry in spite of having piece-wise straight trajectories. We show that our billiards preserve the ergodic and mixing properties of conventional billiards while they may…
This paper is the third in a series which explores a combinatorial method for generating lattice polygons in the plane. I call this method the plaid model. In this paper I prove the main result I had been aiming for since the beginning,…
Dogru and Tabachnikov in 2003 explored the polygonal outer billiard map in the hyperbolic plane and introduced a class of convex polygons called 'large'. They particularly sought conditions for a triangle to be classified as large. For a…
We prove that if the outer billiard map around a plane oval is algebraically integrable in a certain non-degenerate sense then the oval is an ellipse.
We study a class of planar billiards having the remarkable property that their phase space consists up to a set of zero measure of two invariant sets formed by orbits moving in opposite directions. The tables of these billiards are tubular…
Given a planar oval, consider the maximal area of inscribed $n$-gons resp. the minimal area of circumscribed $n$-gons. One obtains two sequences indexed by $n$, and one of Dowker's theorems states that the first sequence is concave and the…
Gravitational billiards provide an experimentally accessible arena for testing formulations of nonlinear dynamics. We present a mathematical model that captures the essential dynamics required for describing the motion of a realistic…
In this long paper we give a fairly complete analysis of outer billiards on the Penrose kite. Our analysis reveals that this 2-dimensional non-compact system has a 3-dimensional compactification, a certain polyhedron exchange map, and that…