Related papers: A Correspondence between Billiards and Geodesics

We present a link between billiards in convex plane domains and Hofer's geometry, an area of symplectic topology. For smooth strictly convex billiard tables, we prove that the Hofer distance between the corresponding billiard ball maps…

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 goal of this paper is an analysis of the geometry of billiards in ellipses, based on properties of confocal central conics. The extended sides of the billiards meet at points which are located on confocal ellipses and hyperbolas. They…

We derive Cayley's type conditions for periodical trajectories for the billiard within an ellipsoid in the Lobachevsky space. It appears that these new conditions are of the same form as those obtained before for the Euclidean case. We…

Any smooth surface in R^3 may be flattened along the z-axis, and the flattened surface becomes close to a billiard table in R^2 . We show that, under some hypotheses, the geodesic flow of this surface converges locally uniformly to the…

Mathematical billiards is much like the real game: a point mass, representing the ball, rolls in a straight line on a (perfectly friction-less) table, striking the sides according to the law of reflection. A billiard trajectory is then…

This work presents a framework for billiards in convex domains on two dimensional Riemannian manifolds. These domains are contained in connected, simply connected open subsets which are totally normal. In this context, some basic properties…

Wire billiard is defined by a smooth embedded closed curve of non-vanishing curvature $k$ in $\mathbb{R}^n$ (a wire). For a class of curves, that we call nice wires, the wire billiard map is area preserving twist map of the cylinder. In…

We study periodic billiard trajectories on a compact Riemannian manifold with boundary, by applying Morse theory to Lagrangian action functionals on the loop space of the manifold. Based on the approximation method due to Benci-Giannoni, we…

Motivated by the high-energy limit of the $N$-body problem we construct non-deterministic billiard process. The billiard table is the complement of a finite collection of linear subspaces within a Euclidean vector space. A trajectory is a…

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…

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…

Many classical facts in Riemannian geometry have their pseudo-Riemannian analogs. For instance, the spaces of space-like and time-like geodesics on a pseudo-Riemannian manifold have natural symplectic structures (just like in the Riemannian…

We give lower bound on the number of periodic billiard trajectories inside a generic smooth strictly convex closed surface in 3-space: for odd n, there are at least 2(n-1) such trajectories. We apply a topological approach based on the…

In this paper we are interested in the motion of a ball inside a billiard table bounded by a particular smooth curve. This table belongs to a family of billiards which can all be drawn by a common process: the so-called gardener's string…

We consider algebraic geometrical properties of the integrable billiard on a quadric Q with elastic impacts along another quadric confocal to Q. These properties are in sharp contrast with those of the ellipsoidal Birkhoff billiards.…

We consider billiard trajectories in a smooth convex body in $\mathbb R^d$ and estimate the number of distinct periodic trajectories that make exactly $p$ reflections per period at the boundary of the body. In the case of prime $p$ we…

Polygonalization of any smooth billiard boundary can be carried out in several ways. We show here that the semiclassical description depends on the polygonalization process and the results can be inequivalent. We also establish that…

A Finsler, not necessarily symmetric, metric in the plane or its convex subset is called projective if its geodesics are straight segments. We consider Finsler billiards in a convex planar domain endowed with a projective Finsler metric. A…

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…