Related papers: On Estimates of the Number of Collisions for Billi…
The principal angles between binary collision subspaces in an $N$-billiard system in $d$-dimensional Euclidean space are computed. These angles are computed for equal masses and arbitrary masses. We then provide a bound on the number of…
We consider a flat metric with conical singularities on the sphere. Under the assumption that no partial sum of angle defects is equal to $2\pi$, we draw on the geometry of immersed disks to obtain an explicit upper bound on the number of…
We consider systems of "pinned balls," i.e., balls that have fixed positions and pseudo-velocities. Pseudo-velocities change according to the same rules as those for velocities of totally elastic collisions between moving balls. The times…
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…
Let $T\subset \R^{m+1}$ be a strictly convex domain bounded by a smooth hypersurface $X=\partial T$. In this paper we find lower bounds on the number of billiard trajectories in $T$ which have a prescribed intial point $A\in X$, a…
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…
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…
We study the geometry of billiard orbits on rectangular billiards. A truncated billiard orbit induces a partition of the rectangle into polygons. We prove that thirteen is a sharp upper bound for the number of different areas of these…
We show that the complexity of the billiard in a typical polygon grows cubically and the number of saddle connections grows quadratically along certain subsequences. It is known that the set of points whose first n-bounces hits the same…
A simple relation is developed between elastic collisions of freely-moving point particles in one dimension and a corresponding billiard system. For two particles with masses m_1 and m_2 on the half-line x>0 that approach an elastic barrier…
We present a game inspired by research on the possible number of billiard ball collisions in the whole Euclidean space. One player tries to place $n$ static "balls" with zero radius (i.e., points) in a way that will minimize the total…
We give a new upper bound $K_+$ on the number of totally elastic collisions of $n$ hard spheres with equal radii and equal masses in $R^d$. Our bound satisfies $\log K_+ \leq c(d) n \log n$.
In this paper the problem of estimating the number of periodical billiard trajectories is considered. The main result is the theorem on Morse theory for periodical billiard trajectories.
The main result of this paper is, that for convex billiards in higher dimensions, in contrast with 2D case, for every point on the boundary and for every $n$ there always exist billiard trajectories developing conjugate points at the $n$-th…
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 article we study the one-dimensional dynamics of elastic collisions of particles with positive and negative mass. We show that such systems are equivalent to billiards induced by an inner product of possibly indefinite signature, we…
We consider systems of "pinned balls," i.e., balls that have fixed positions and pseudo-velocities. Pseudo-velocities change according to the same rules as those for velocities of totally elastic collisions between moving balls. The times…
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…
From a geometric viewpoint, billiard trajectories and geodesics are related by mutual approximation results. In one direction, it is known that every geodesic curve in the boundary of a smooth convex body can be approximated by a sequence…
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…