Four equivalent properties of integrable billiards (Q2022794)

This paper discusses foliations on Riemannian surfaces and their relationship with the caustics arising in billiards dynamics. A billiard caustic is a curve such that if a segment of a billiard trajectory is tangent to it, then the reflected segment is also tangent to it. Underlying the authors' work is an interest in resolving Birkhoff's conjecture, which states that if the interior neighborhood of a smooth strictly convex boundary curve of a billiard table in ordinary Euclidean space is foliated by caustics, then this curve is an ellipse. The authors formulate a conjecture related to their own work that would imply the validity of the Birkhoff conjecture. The authors' main result is the equivalence of four properties related to foliations. The authors begin by noticing that there is no easy way to find a caustic given a billiard table. They instead address the converse problem using what they call a ``string construction''. The four equivalent properties of integrable billiards of the title are the following: (1) A certain foliation \(\mathcal{F}_1\) has the Graves property; (2) The inner boundary curve of a closed annulus \(\mathcal{A}\) has the Poritsky property; (3) Two foliations \(\mathcal{F}_1\) and \(\mathcal{F}_2\) form a Liouville net; (4) The net \((\mathcal{F}_1, \mathcal{F}_2)\) in \(\mathcal{A}\) has the Ivory property. The terms used here are defined as follows. Start with a closed annulus \(\mathcal{A}\) with a Riemannian metric that has a foliation \(\mathcal{F}_1\) with smooth strictly geodesically convex curves, and take \(\mathcal{F}_2\) to be the foliation arising from curves orthogonal to the leaves of \(\mathcal{F}_1\). The Graves property is a property of \(\mathcal{A}\), such that for every pair of nested leaves the outer one is obtained by the string construction from the inner one. In particular, this applies to the boundary curves. The string construction refers to a way to construct a construct a billiard table from a caustic. Starting with a curve \(\gamma\), wrap a non-stretchable string around \(\gamma\), pull it tight at a point, and move the point around while keeping the string tight. The trajectory of the point is a curve \(\Gamma\), and it is the boundary of a billiard table for which \(\gamma\) is a caustic. From the construction arises a one-parameter family of curves \(\Gamma\) where the parameter is the length of the string. A closed smooth strictly convex curve \(\gamma\) of length \(l\) has the Poritsky property if it has a parametrization \(\gamma(t)\) such that for some \(L > l \) and all lengths of the string in the interval \([l, L]\), the string diffeomorphisms are all shifts \(t \rightarrow t + c\). A Liouville net is a pair of orthogonal foliations such any choice of parametrization of leaves in each of them results with coordinates on the surface bringing the Riemannian metric into Liouville form. The Ivory property means that a net of curves in the plane has diagonals whose lengths in each net quadrilateral are equal. A net quadrilateral is a curvilinear quadrilateral whose sides lie on the net curves.