English

Polygonal billiards and "optical tori"

General Mathematics 2015-07-24 v1

Abstract

We give an optical physicist view of the problem of the trajectories in a polygonal billiard using only basic facts of Optics and the theory of functions of a complex variable. This approach allow us to stablish a certain correspondence between n-gon billiards and one-holed 2n-punctured tori. Therefore the existence of periodic trajectories in a certain polygon becomes the problem of the existence of closed geodesics in its associated torus.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1507.06635,
  title  = {Polygonal billiards and "optical tori"},
  author = {Eduardo Díaz-Miguel},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1507.06635},
  year   = {2015}
}

Comments

9 pages, 6 figures

R2 v1 2026-06-22T10:17:26.160Z