Hyperbolic billiards on polytopes with contracting reflection laws (Q515247)

This paper studies billiard trajectories within polytopes, in other words, sequences of reflections on the faces of the polytopes. Given a polytope \(P\), a billiard trajectory can be represented as a sequence of pairs \((p,v)\) where \(p\) is a point on a face of \(P\) and \(v\) is a unit velocity vector pointing inside \(P\). Although billiard trajectories have usually been studied using the specular (mirror-like) reflection law, the authors of this paper consider contracting reflection laws. In the polygonal case, contracting reflection laws are reflections whose unit velocity vectors are contracted toward the normal vector of a face of \(P\). The authors extend some results for billiards on polygons with contracting reflection laws to the case of arbitrary \(d\)-polytopes. For example, they show that the contracting billiard map of a polytope is partially hyperbolic. This is used to prove their main result Theorem~2.10, which states that ``the contracting billiard map uniformly expands the unstable direction along the orbit of any \(k\)-generating point'', and that ``the expanding rate depends only on the polytope and contracting reflection law''. Section~2 provides most definitions needed and gives statements of the most important results. The necessary background in general Euclidean geometry is provided. Precise definitions for contracting laws, billiard trajectories, and hyperbolic probability measures are provided. In Section~3, a brief discussion of polytopes with vertices placed in general position is provided. Section~4 focuses on escaping times of billiards on polyhedral cones with contracting reflection laws. Section~5 discusses uniform expansion, and is primarily concerned with proving Theorem~5.3, a result crucial to establishing Theorem~2.10 Leading up to the proof of Theorem~5.3, the authors show that trajectory spaces of orbits of billiard maps are compact. They also provide conditions for which a time interval is a \(\delta\)-collinearity of a given trajectory. Section 6 provides the proof of Theorem~2.10 and two other theorems from Section~2, as well as two corollaries. The final section gives a detailed study of contracting billiards on a certain class of 3-simplices.