Coding chaotic billiards. I: Non-compact billiards on a negative curvature manifold (Q916183)

The authors present a method for coding billiards by using a proper surface of section, the bounce mapping, and by foliating the reduced phase space into regions associated with a given code. The procedure is applied to non-compact polygonal billiards defined on a manifold of constant negative curvature. A simple grammar rule is necessary and sufficient to ensure existence and uniqueness of the coding. A simple coding of the trajectories is obtained for an N-sided polygonal billiard with all its vertices on the boundary of Poincaré disk. The alphabet is the set of labels \(X=\{1,2,...,N\}\) of the sides of the billiard and the code associated to each trajectory is merely the enumeration of the sides it successively bounces on. Each doubly infinite code is univoquely associated with a trajectory provided the words satisfy simple grammar rules.