English

Chaotic properties for billiards in circular polygons

Dynamical Systems 2024-10-15 v2 Chaotic Dynamics

Abstract

We study billiards in domains enclosed by circular polygons. These are closed C1C^1 strictly convex curves formed by finitely many circular arcs. We prove the existence of a set in phase space, corresponding to generic sliding trajectories close enough to the boundary of the domain, in which the return billiard dynamics is semiconjugate to a transitive subshift on infinitely many symbols that contains the full NN-shift as a topological factor for any NNN \in \mathbb{N}, so it has infinite topological entropy. We prove the existence of uncountably many asymptotic generic sliding trajectories approaching the boundary with optimal uniform linear speed, give an explicit exponentially big (in qq) lower bound on the number of qq-periodic trajectories as qq \to \infty, and present an unusual property of the length spectrum. Our proofs are entirely analytical.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2309.09892,
  title  = {Chaotic properties for billiards in circular polygons},
  author = {Andrew Clarke and Rafael Ramírez-Ros},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2309.09892},
  year   = {2024}
}

Comments

42 pages, 7 figures

R2 v1 2026-06-28T12:25:00.905Z