Resonance of ellipsoidal billiard trajectories and extremal rational functions (Q6045739)

The aim of this paper is to initiate investigation of resonant billiard trajectories within ellipsoids in \(d\)-dimensional Euclidean space and to relate them, on one side, to the theory of approximation, in particular the extremal rational functions on the systems of \(d\) intervals on the real line, and on the other side, to weak periodicity which originated in [the authors, Adv. Math. 219, No. 5, 1577--1607 (2008; Zbl 1154.37022)]. In this paper, the main object are the billiard systems within quadrics in dimensions higher than two. The link provided allows fundamental properties of billiard dynamics to be derived and provides a comprehensive study of a large class of non-periodic trajectories of such billiard systems. The authors derive fundamental properties of the billiard dynamics and provide a comprehensive study of a large class of non-periodic trajectories of such billiard systems. This fruitful link enables them to prove fundamental properties of the billiard dynamics and to provide a comprehensive study of a large class of non-periodic trajectories of integrable billiards. A key ingredient is a functional-polynomial relation of a generalized Pell type. Applying further these ideas and techniques to \(s\)-weak billiard trajectories, the authors come to a functional-polynomial relation of the same generalized Pell type. This paper is organized as follows: Section 1 is an introduction to the subject and summarizes the main results. In section 2, the authors review the notion of \((E,m)\)-representation and formulate the main new extremal problem, so-called restricted extremal problem for rational functions of bounded degree of the denominator on a system of \(d\) real intervals. The main result obtained in this section provides the rigidity and uniqueness conditions for a system of \(d\) intervals to admit solutions of the restricted extremal problem with a prescribed degree of the denominator (which allows a solution of a generalized of the so-called Pell equation of a given form). Section 3 is devoted to resonant billiard trajectories within ellipsoid. Here the authors review the winding numbers associated to periodic trajectories of billiards within ellipsoids in an arbitrary-dimensional Euclidean space. Then they generalise the frequency map to all trajectories and define resonance for non-periodic ones, and employ the restricted extremal problem from Section 2 to discuss the caustics of resonant billiard trajectories. Section 4 deals with weak periodicity (a natural stratification of non-periodic ellipsoidal billiard trajectories) and hyperelliptic curves. In the previous section the authors investigated a classification of non-periodic ellipsoidal billiard trajectories, based on notions of resonance and adjoint resonance, which depend on dynamical properties of trajectories. Another natural classification of non-periodic ellipsoidal billiard trajectories was introduced by the authors in [loc. cit.]. This is the concept of weak periodicity, which relays on the geometry of lines tangent to the same set of quadrics from a given confocal family, and is introduced later in this section. The main result obtained here characterizes weak periodic trajectories in terms of generalized Pell equations. Finally, the rest is devoted to examples of weak periodic trajectories in dimensions \(3\) and \(4\).