English

Lagrangian Relations and Linear Point Billiards

Dynamical Systems 2017-03-08 v1

Abstract

Motivated by the high-energy limit of the NN-body problem we construct non-deterministic billiard process. The billiard table is the complement of a finite collection of linear subspaces within a Euclidean vector space. A trajectory is a constant speed polygonal curve with vertices on the subspaces and change of direction upon hitting a subspace governed by `conservation of momentum' (mirror reflection). The itinerary of a trajectory is the list of subspaces it hits, in order. Two basic questions are: (A) Are itineraries finite? (B) What is the structure of the space of all trajectories having a fixed itinerary? In a beautiful series of papers Burago-Ferleger-Kononenko [BFK] answered (A) affirmatively by using non-smooth metric geometry ideas and the notion of a Hadamard space. We answer (B) by proving that this space of trajectories is diffeomorphic to a Lagrangian relation on the space of lines in the Euclidean space. Our methods combine those of BFK with the notion of a generating family for a Lagrangian relation.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1606.01420,
  title  = {Lagrangian Relations and Linear Point Billiards},
  author = {Jacques Féjoz and Andreas Knauf and Richard Montgomery},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1606.01420},
  year   = {2017}
}

Comments

29 pages, 4 figures

R2 v1 2026-06-22T14:17:51.231Z