Bridge to Hyperbolic Polygonal Billiards
Abstract
It is well-known that billiards in polygons cannot be chaotic (hyperbolic). Particularly Kolmogorov-Sinai entropy of any polygonal billiard is zero. We consider physical polygonal billiards where a moving particle is a hard disc rather than a point (mathematical) particle and show that typical physical polygonal billiard is hyperbolic at least on a subset of positive measure and therefore has a positive Kolmogorov- Sinai entropy for any positive radius of the moving particle (provided that the particle is not so big that it cannot move within a polygon). This happens because a typical physical polygonal billiard is equivalent to a mathematical (point particle) semi-dispersing billiard. We also conjecture that in fact typical physical billiard in polygon is ergodic under the same conditions.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2008.05389,
title = {Bridge to Hyperbolic Polygonal Billiards},
author = {Hassan Attarchi and Leonid A. Bunimovich},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2008.05389},
year = {2020}
}
Comments
9 pages, 4 figures