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