Big islands in dispersing billiard-like potentials (Q1809177)

The authors study the following problem: let a plane dispersing scattering billiard be given in a domain \(D\subset R^2\); how is its dynamics changed if one smoothens the billiard flow replacing the rigid wall potential by an approximating smooth potential? The main result of the paper answers this question in the case when the initial billiard problem contains a so-called simple singular periodic orbit (the related set of paths contains one segment with a quadratic tangency to the billiard boundary). It turns out that under some natural assumptions near such a singular periodic orbit an elliptic periodic orbit arises for the smoothened potential. This implies the existence of surrounding elliptic islands, the flow ceases to be ergodic, etc. To prove the result the authors construct a Poincaré map near the perturbed periodic orbit and find its asymptotics for the perturbation tending to zero. This allows them to conclude that related elliptic periodic orbit appeared is of the general elliptic type (one of the Birkhoff coefficients is nonzero). This implies the existence of a nearby elliptic island. The size of this island with respect to a perturbation parameter is estimated.