Related papers: Billiard trajectories inside Cones
It is well known that a rigid motion of the Euclidean plane can be written as the composition of at most three reflections. It is perhaps not so widely known that a similar result holds for Euclidean space in any number of dimensions. The…
We consider the outer billiards map with contraction outside polygons. We construct a 1-parameter family of systems such that each system has an open set in which the dynamics is reduced to that of a piecewise contraction on the interval.…
A polygon is called rational if the angle between each pair of sides is a rational multiple of $\pi.$ The main theorem we will prove is Theorem 1: For rational polygons, periodic points of the billiard flow are dense in the phase space of…
We study geometry of confocal quadrics in pseudo-Euclidean spaces of an arbitrary dimension $d$ and any signature, and related billiard dynamics. The goal is to give a complete description of periodic billiard trajectories within…
A body moves in a medium composed of noninteracting point particles; interaction of particles with the body is absolutely elastic. It is required to find the body's shape minimizing or maximizing resistance of the medium to its motion. This…
Billiard models of single particles moving freely in two-dimensional regions enclosed by hard walls, have long provided ideal toy models for the investigation of dynamical systems and chaos. Recently, billiards with (semi-)permeable walls…
In this paper we study the behavior of geodesics on cones over arbitrary $C^3$-smooth closed Riemannian manifolds. We show that the geodesic flow on such cones admits first integrals whose values uniquely determine almost all geodesics…
Establishing global well-posedness and convergence toward equilibrium of the Boltzmann equation with specular reflection boundary condition has been one of the central questions in the subject of kinetic theory. Despite recent significant…
We consider 3-periodic orbits in an elliptic billiard. Numerical experiments conducted by Dan Reznik have shown that the locus of the centers of inscribed circles of the corresponding triangles is an ellipse. We prove this fact by the…
\textsc{J. Hadamard} studied the geometric properties of geodesic flows on surfaces of negative curvature, thus initiating "Symbolic Dynamics". In this article, we follow the same geometric approach to study the geodesic trajectories of…
Consider a strictly convex set $\Omega$ in the plane, and a homogeneous, stationary magnetic field orthogonal to the plane whose strength is $B$ on the complement of $\Omega$ and $0$ inside $\Omega$. The trajectories of a charged particle…
We introduce a new dynamical system: the wind-tree tiling billiards. This system studies trajectories of a ray in Euclidean space which has a negative refractive index when encountering rectangular obstacles located at lattice points. We…
We consider a billiard in the plane with periodic configuration of convex scatterers. This system is recurrent, in the sense that almost every orbit comes back arbitrarily close to the initial point. In this paper we study the time needed…
In this experimental work we study billiard trajectories in triangular pyramids and try to establish conditions that guarantee the existence (or absence) of 4-cycles (there can be not more, than three of them). We formulate conjectures and…
In this work we prove that if for a pair of convex bodies $K_1, K_2 \subset \mathbb{R}^n$, $n \geq 3$, there exists a hyperplane $H$ and two distinct points $p_1$ and $p_2$ in $\mathbb{R}^n \setminus H$ such that for every $(n-2)$-plane $M…
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…
The illumination problem is a popular topic in recreational mathematics: In a mirrored room, is every region illuminable from every point in the region? So-called \enquote{unilluminable rooms} are related to \enquote{trapped sets} in…
We study the dynamics of a piecewise map defined on the set of three pairwise nonparallel, nonconcurrent lines in $\mathbb{R}^2$. The geometric map of study may be analogized to the billiard map with a different reflection rule so that each…
In this paper, we show that any smooth one-parameter deformations of a strictly convex integrable billiard table $\Omega_0$ preserving the integrability near the boundary have to be tangent to a finite dimensional space passing through…
Given a quadratically convex compact connected oriented hypersurface $N$ of the complex hyperbolic plane, we prove that the characteristic rays of the symplectic form restricted to $N$ determine a double geodesic foliation of the exterior…