Billiards in rectangles with barriers (Q1409315)

The paper studies billiards on the unit square with an interior barrier consisting of a vertical line segment of irrational height extending up from a rational base point on the lower side of the square. Asymptotic formulas are developed for the number of families of parallel closed orbits of length at most \(T\). These estimates are of the form of a rational multiple of \(\pi T^2\). The rational factor depends only on the denominator \(q\) of the base point \((p/q,0)\).