Ivrii's Conjecture states that in every billiard in Euclidean space the set of periodic orbits has measure zero. It implies that for every $k\geq2$ there are no k-reflective billiards, i.e., billiards having an open set of k-periodic orbits. This conjecture is open in Euclidean spaces, with just few partial results. It is known that in the two-dimensional sphere there exist 3-reflective billiards (Yu.M.Baryshnikov). All the 3-reflective spherical billiards were classified in a paper by V.Blumen, K.Kim, J.Nance, V.Zharnitsky: the boundary of each of them lies in three orthogonal big circles. In the present paper we study the analogue of Ivrii's Conjecture for projective billiards introduced by S.Tabachnikov. In two dimensions there exists a 3-reflective projective billiard, the so-called right-spherical billiard, which is the projection of a spherical 3-reflective billiard. We show that the only 3-reflective planar projective billiard with piecewise smooth boundary is the above-mentioned right-spherical billiard. In higher dimensions, we prove the non-existence of 3-reflective projective billiards with piecewise smooth boundary, and also the non-existence of projective billiards with piecewise smooth boundary having a subset of triangular orbits of non-zero measure in the phase space.
We consider 3-periodic orbits in an elliptic billiard. Numerical experiments conducted by Dan Reznik have shown that the locus of the centers of inscribed circles of the corresponding triangles is an ellipse. We prove this fact by the complexification of the problem coupled with the complex law or rfelection.
We identify all translation covers among triangular billiard surfaces. Our main tools are the holonomy field of Kenyon and Smillie and a geometric property of translation surfaces, which we call the fingerprint of a point, that is preserved under balanced translation covers.
The locus of centers of inscribed circles in triangles, the 3-periodic orbits of an elliptic billiard, is also an ellipse. In this work we obtain the canonical equation of this ellipse, complementing the previous results obtained by O. Romaskevich.
In the class of projective billiards, which contains the usual billiards, we exhibit counter-examples to Ivrii's conjecture, which states that in any planar billiard with smooth boundary the set of periodic orbits has zero measure. The counter-examples are polygons admitting a $2$-parameters family of $n$-periodic orbits, with $n$ being either $3$ or any even number grower than $4$.
New invariants in the one-dimensional family of 3-periodic orbits in the elliptic billiard were introduced by the authors in "Can the Elliptic Billiard Still Surprise Us?" (2020), Math. Intelligencer, 42(1): 6--17, some of which were generalized to $N>3$. Invariants mentioned there included ratios of radii and/or areas, sum of angle cosines, and a special stationary circle. Here we present some of the proofs omitted there as well as a few new related facts.
The article studies a generalization of the elliptic billiard to the complex domain. We show that the billiard orbits also have caustics, and that the number of such caustics is bigger than for the real case. For example, for a given ellipse E, there exist exactly two confocal ellipses such that the triangular orbits of E are circumscribed about one of them, and each tangent line to one of those ellipses is a side of a triangular orbit. We also give a bound on the number of caustics for orbits with a fixed number of sides.
This document is the manuscript of Corentin Fierobe's thesis about the billiard as a dynamical system. The first pages (title, introduction) are in French, but the rest of the document is in English.
In this paper, we use the projective dynamical approach to integrable mechanical billiards as in [Zhao, 2021] to establish the integrability of natural mechanical billiards with the Lagrange problem, which is the superposition of two Kepler problems and a Hooke problem, with the Hooke center at the middle of the Kepler centers, as the underlying mechanical systems, and with any combinations of confocal conic sections with foci at the Kepler centers as the reflection wall, in the plane, on the sphere, and in the hyperbolic plane. This covers many previously known integrable mechanical billiards…
We prove that any sufficiently small perturbation of an isosceles triangle has a periodic billiard path. Our proof involves the analysis of certain infinite families of Fourier series that arise in connection with triangular billiards, and reveals some self-similarity phenomena in irrational triangular billiards. Our analysis illustrates the surprising fact that billiards on a triangle near a Veech triangle is extremely complicated even though Billiards on a Veech triangle is very well understood.
We study pinball billiard dynamics in an equilateral triangular table. In such dynamics, collisions with the walls are non-elastic: the outgoing angle with the normal vector to the boundary is a uniform factor $λ< 1$ smaller than the incoming angle. This leads to contraction in phase space for the discrete-time dynamics between consecutive collisions, and hence to attractors of zero Lebesgue measure, which are almost always fractal strange attractors with chaotic dynamics, due to the presence of an expansion mechanism. We study the structure of these strange attractors and their evolution as t…
The aim of this note is to explain the integrability of an integrable Boltzmann billiard model, previously established by Gallavotti and Jauslin in arXiv:2008.01955, alternatively via the viewpoint of projective dynamics. The additional first integral is shown to be related to the energy of a corresponding system on a hemisphere. We show that this viewpoint applies to certain other billiard models in the plane defined through Kepler-Coulomb problems as well. The approach also leads to a family of integrable billiard models on the sphere defined through the spherical Kepler-Coulomb problem.
A caustic of a strictly convex planar bounded billiard is a smooth curve whose tangent lines are reflected from the billiard boundary to its tangent lines. The famous Birkhoff Conjecture states that if the billiard boundary has an inner neighborhood foliated by closed caustics, then the billiard is an ellipse. It was studied by many mathematicians, including H.Poritsky, M.Bialy, S.Bolotin, A.Mironov, V.Kaloshin, A.Sorrentino and others. In the paper we study its following generalized dual version stated by S.Tabachnikov. Consider a closed smooth strictly convex curve $γ\subset\mathbb{RP}^2$ eq…
We explore connections furnished by the Funk metric, a relative of the Hilbert metric, between projective geometry, billiards, convex geometry and affine inequalities. We first show that many metric invariants of the Funk metric are invariant under projective transformations as well as projective duality. These include the Holmes-Thompson volume and surface area of convex subsets, and the length spectrum of their boundary, extending results of Holmes-Thompson and Álvarez Paiva on Schäffer's dual girth conjecture. We explore in particular Funk billiards, which generalize hyperbolic billiards in…
The famous conjecture of V.Ya.Ivrii (1978) says that {\it in every billiard with infinitely-smooth boundary in a Euclidean space the set of periodic orbits has measure zero}. In the present paper we study the complex version of Ivrii's conjecture for odd-periodic orbits in planar billiards, with reflections from complex analytic curves. We prove positive answer in the following cases: 1) triangular orbits; 2) odd-periodic orbits in the case, when the mirrors are algebraic curves avoiding two special points at infinity, the so-called isotropic points. We provide immediate applications to the re…
The arithmetic triangular billiards are classically chaotic but have Poissonian energy level statistics, in ostensible violation of the BGS conjecture. We show that the length spectra of their periodic orbits divides into subspectra differing by the parity of the number of reflections from the triangle sides; in the quantum treatment that parity defines the reflection phase of the orbit contribution to the Gutzwiller formula for the energy level density. We apply these results to all 85 arithmetic triangles and establish the boundary conditions under which the quantum billiard is \textquotedbl…
The famous conjecture of V.Ya.Ivrii (1978) says that {\it in every billiard with infinitely-smooth boundary in a Euclidean space the set of periodic orbits has measure zero}. In the present paper we study the complex algebraic version of Ivrii's conjecture for quadrilateral orbits in two dimensions, with reflections from complex algebraic curves. We present the complete classification of 4-reflective algebraic counterexamples: billiards formed by four complex algebraic curves in the projective plane that have open set of quadrilateral orbits.
The famous conjecture of V.Ya.Ivrii says that {\it in every billiard with infinitely-smooth boundary in a Euclidean space the set of periodic orbits has measure zero}. In the present paper we study its complex analytic version for quadrilateral orbits in two dimensions, with reflections from holomorphic curves. We present the complete classification of 4-reflective complex analytic counterexamples: billiards formed by four holomorphic curves in the projective plane that have open set of quadrilateral orbits. This extends the previous author's result classifying 4-reflective complex planar alge…
We consider the action of $SL(2,\mathbb{R})$ on a vector bundle $\mathbf{H}$ preserving an ergodic probability measure $ν$ on the base $X$. Under an irreducibility assumption on this action, we prove that if $\hatν$ is any lift of $ν$ to a probability measure on the projectivized bunde $\mathbb{P}(\mathbf{H})$ that is invariant under the upper triangular subgroup, then $\hat ν$ is supported in the projectivization $\mathbb{P}(\mathbf{E}_1)$ of the top Lyapunov subspace of the positive diagonal semigroup. We derive two applications. First, the Lyapunov exponents for the Kontsevich-Zorich cocycl…
We investigate mushroom billiards, a class of dynamical systems with sharply divided phase space. For typical values of the control parameter of the system $ρ$, an infinite number of marginally unstable periodic orbits (MUPOs) exist making the system sticky in the sense that unstable orbits approach regular regions in phase space and thus exhibit regular behaviour for long periods of time. The problem of finding these MUPOs is expressed as the well known problem of finding optimal rational approximations of a real number, subject to some system-specific constraints. By introducing a generalize…
