Related papers: On the finite blocking property

By a classical result of Darboux, a foliation of a Riemannian surface has the Graves property (also known as the strong evolution property) if and only if the foliation comes from a Liouville net. A similar result of Blaschke says that a…

A periodic trajectory on a polygonal billiard table is stable if it persists under any sufficiently small perturbation of the table. It is a standard result that a periodic trajectory on an $n$-gon gives rise in a natural way to a closed…

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…

In this note we study the higher dimensional convex billiards satisfying the so-called Gutkin property. A convex hypersurface $S$ satisfies this property if any chord $[p,q]$ which forms angle $\delta$ with the tangent hyperplane at $p$ has…

We use Poonen's closed point sieve to prove two independent results. First, we show that the obvious obstruction to embedding a curve in a smooth surface is the only obstruction over a perfect field, by proving the finite field analogue of…

We construct generalized polygons (`parking garages') in which the billiard flow satisfies the Veech dichotomy, although the associated translation surface obtained from the Zemlyakov-Katok unfolding is not a lattice surface. We also…

The Veech group of a translation surface is the group of Jacobians of orientation-preserving affine automorphisms of the surface. We present an algorithm which constructs all translation surfaces with a given lattice Veech group in any…

We consider polygons with the following ``pairing property'': for each edge of the polygon there is precisely one other edge parallel to it. We study the problem of when such a polygon $K$ tiles the plane multiply when translated at the…

We prove that, for translation surfaces whose homology is generated by the periodic orbits, the notions of - finite blocking property - pure periodicity - torus branched covering are equivalent. In particular, we prove this equivalence for…

We provide a complete classification of groups that can be realized as isometry groups of a translation surface $M$ with non-finitely generated fundamental group and no planar ends. Furthermore, we demonstrate that if $S$ has no…

We completely characterize rational polygons whose billiard flow is weakly mixing in almost every direction as those which are not almost integrable, in the terminology of Gutkin, modulo some low complexity exceptions. This proves a…

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…

The standard Wojtkowski-Markarian-Donnay-Bunimovich technique for the hyperbolicity of focusing or mixed billiards in the plane requires the diameter of a billiard table to be of the same order as the largest ray of curvature along the…

We provide a method to straighten each billiard trajectory in a flat disk. As an application, we show that for each point on the disk and for almost all directions, the closure of the corresponding billiard trajectory contains a vertex. We…

Motivated by the study of billiards in polyhedra, we study linear flows in a family of singular flat $3$-manifolds which we call translation prisms. Using ideas of Furstenberg and Veech, we connect results about weak mixing properties of…

We study the symmetries and geodesics of an infinite translation surface which arises as a limit of translation surfaces built from regular polygons, studied by Veech. We find the affine symmetry group of this infinite translation surface,…

For any finite horizon Sinai billiard map T on the two-torus, we find t_*>1 such that for each t in (0,t_*) there exists a unique equilibrium state $\mu_t$ for $- t\log J^uT$, and $\mu_t$ is T-adapted. (In particular, the SRB measure is the…

This paper studies balance properties for billiard words. Billiard words generalize Sturmian words by coding trajectories in hypercubic billiards. In the setting of aperiodic order, they also provide the simplest examples of quasicrystals,…

We show that in any non-arithmetic rank 1 orbit closure of translation surfaces, there are only finitely many Teichm\"uller curves. We also show that in any non-arithmetic rank 1 orbit closure, any completely parabolic surface is Veech.

Let $X$ be a smooth projective threefold of Picard number one for which the generalized Bogomlov-Gieseker inequality holds. We characterize the limit Bridgeland semistable objects at large volume in the vertical region of the geometric…