Questions tagged [billiards]
Billiards are a class of dynamical systems in which a point particle moves uniformly in a domain $D\subset \mathbb{R}^d$ except for mirror-like reflections from the boundary. Varying $D$ leads to examples satisfying many ergodic properties. Billiards enhance visual explanations of dynamical concepts to students and the general public. There are many applications in physics and image processing. The free motion and/or reflection rule may be generalized.
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Hexagon tiling and affine Weyl group $\widetilde{A}_2$
Let $H$ be a regular hexagonal room centered at the origin. Let $W$ be the group generated by reflections about the six sides of $H$. It's well known that $W$ is the affine Weyl group of type $\...
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Mixing for a gas of hard spheres
The gas of hard spheres is a model for a gas in a container, where each particle is a sphere of radius $\epsilon$. The spheres interact with each other and with the container with elastic collisions. ...
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Periodic orbits in planar smooth billiard table with large periods
Given a plane billiard table with a smooth boundary which is a Jordan curve, I wonder if there is always a periodic orbit with sufficiently large period.
Formulation of my question: We are considering ...
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Billiard circuits in pentagons
A billiard circuit in a convex $n$-gon is a closed billiard path
of $n$ segments reflecting from consecutive edges of the polygon.
Every regular $n$-gon has such a billiard circuit:
Recently a ...
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Is there an inventory of closed billiard paths in a regular tetrahedron?
Conway found a closed billiard-ball trajectory in a regular tetrahedron:
Image: Izidor Hafner
Since then Bedaride and Rao
Bedaride, Nicolas, and Michael Rao. "Regular simplices and periodic ...
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Proving light escapes mirrors via ergodic theory of billiards
There's a longstanding open problem concerning whether or not it's possible to trap all the light from a point source using a finite collection of circles/lines whose sides are mirrors. This seems ...
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Minimum reflection paths in a mirror polygon
Let $P$ be a simple, orthogonal polygon of $n$ edges, i.e., one whose edges meet at right angles,
and is non-self-intersecting;
also known as a rectilinear polygon.
Treat every edge of $P$ as a ...
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Can a laser hit all the mirrors out of order?
For this question, a "cycle" is a sequence of distinct points
$X = (x_1,x_2,\cdots,x_k)\in\mathbb{R}^3$ which defines a piecewise linear path starting at $x_1$ and visiting the points in ...
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Arithmetic billiards, prime numbers and the Goldbach conjecture
I've edited the following post on Mathematics Stack Exchange, (now closed, at that date I'm suspended) with identifier 4510963, please let me to know if you've some doubt or I can improve the post.
On ...
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Question about the inverse operator on PSL(2,R) with respect to Liouville measure
In GTM 259 chapter 9 and Katok Hasselbaltt Introduction to Modern Theory of Dynamical System chapter 5 (using the Iwasawa KAN decomposition)
we see the Unit Tangent bundle of Hyperbolic half plane is ...
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2-ball billiards in a circle
Consider a 2D circular billiards table with diameter 1m containing two
balls with diameter 0.25m. Let each ball start with a speed of 1m/s.
In general, this speed could change after the balls hit ...
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Examples of different levels of the ergodic hierachy (specifically: weakly mixing & merely ergodic)
I am interested in generalizing some aspects of the ergodic hierarchy (of classical dynamical systems) to quantum theory. However, while I understand the definitions of the different levels of the ...
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Pocket billiards with balls in general position
There were at least two earlier MO questions about ideal pocket billiards.
(Ideal: frictionless, perfectly elastic collisions.)
Perfectly centered break of a perfectly aligned pool ball rack.
Does ...
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Illuminating a just-barely irrational polygon
As has been discussed earlier on MO,1,2
recently an impressive advance was proved concerning
internally illuminating a mirrored polygon.
Here is the result:
Let $P$ be a rational polygon.
Then for ...
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Maximal length of trajectories in billiard
Consider discrete rectangular billard on lattice with integer dimensions a*b and n balls with radius $\frac{\sqrt 2}{2}$ and ...
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