Related papers: Dual billiards, twist maps, and impact oscillators
Given a graph $G$ with vertex set $\{1,\ldots,n\}$, we can project the graphical arrangement of $G$ to an $(n-1)$-dimensional torus to obtain a toric hyperplane arrangement. Adams, Defant, and Striker constructed a toric combinatorial…
Caustics are curves with the property that a billiard trajectory, once tangent to it, stays tangent after every reflection at the boundary of the billiard table. When the billiard table is an ellipse, any nonsingular billiard trajectory has…
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 analyze the impact of two equal billiard balls in three ideal situations: when the balls freely slide on the plane of the billiard, when they roll without sliding and when one of them freely slides and the other rolls. In all the cases…
Perturbations due to round-off errors in computer modeling are discontinuous and therefore one cannot use results like KAM theory about smooth perturbations of twist maps. We elaborate a special approximation scheme to construct two smooth…
In this paper we show that, under certain generic conditions, billiards on ovals have only a finite number of periodic orbits, for each period, all non-degenerate and at least one of them is hyperbolic. Moreover, the invariant curves of two…
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…
In this paper, we show that for exact area-preserving twist maps on annulus, the invariant circles with a given rotation number can be destroyed by arbitrarily small Gevrey-$\alpha$ perturbations of the integrable generating function in the…
We consider billiard ball motion in a convex domain of the Euclidean plane bounded by a piece-wise smooth curve influenced by the constant magnetic field. We show that if there exists a polynomial in velocities integral of the magnetic…
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…
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…
In this paper we introduce a new dynamical system which we call Angular billiard. It acts on the exterior points of a convex curve in Euclidean plane. In a neighborhood of the boundary curve this system turns out to be dual to the Birkhoff…
The billiard dynamics inside an ellipse is integrable. It has zero topological entropy, four separatrices in the phase space, and a continuous family of convex caustics: the confocal ellipses. We prove that the curvature flow destroys the…
We present a case study for the semiclassical calculation of the oscillations in the particle and kinetic-energy densities for the two-dimensional circular billiard. For this system, we can give a complete classification of all closed…
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…
The aim of the paper is to unify the efforts in the study of integrable billiards within quadrics in flat and curved spaces and to explore further the interplay of symplectic and contact integrability. As a starting point in this direction,…
We describe some dynamical properties of one parameter families of billiards on convex curves (ovals) which are deformed by the curvature (curve-shortening) flow. We obtain the bifurcations of the period two orbits and some special…
In this article we investigate rigidity properties of integrable area-preserving twist maps of the cylinder. More specifically, we prove that if a deformation of the standard integrable map preserves rotational invariant circles (i.e.,…
We define billiards in the context of sub-Finsler Geometry. We provide symplectic and variational (or rather, control theoretical) descriptions of the problem and show that they coincide. We then discuss several phenomena in this setting,…
While billiard systems of various shapes have been used as paradigmatic model systems in the fields of nonlinear dynamics and quantum chaos, few studies have investigated anisotropic billiards. Motivated by the tremendous advances in using…