Nonsmooth convex caustics for Birkhoff billiards
A Birkhoff billiard problem is devoted to the study of the motion of a free particle in a bounded region (called \textit{billiard table}) reflecting elastically at the boundary. This topic has relevance in dynamical (especially Hamiltonian) systems. Let us consider a convex body \(K\) whose boundary is a simple closed \(\mathcal{C}^1\)-smooth convex curve denoted by \(\Gamma.\) Let \(K'\) be a convex body inside the interior of \(K\). The boundary \(\gamma\) of \(K'\) is a convex \textit{caustic} of \(\Gamma\) if once a billiard trajectory starting at a point from \(\Gamma\) is tangent to \(K'\), the subsequent trajectories remain tangent to \(K'\) after every reflections at \(\Gamma\). We can assign to every convex caustic a parameter called \textit{rotation number} (see [\textit{K. F. Siburg}, The principle of least action in geometry and dynamics. Berlin: Springer (2004; Zbl 1060.37048)]). For a given convex body \(K'\), the well-known \textit{string construction} provides a curve \(\Gamma\) having the boundary of \(K'\) as its billiard caustic. The authors give a geometric proof of the following result by \textit{N. Innami} [Nihonkai Math. J. 13, No. 1, 73--120 (2002; Zbl 1035.37027)] using the string construction: if there exists a sequence of convex caustics inside \(\Gamma\) such that their rotation numbers tend to \(1/2\), then \(\Gamma\) is an ellipse. The main result in the paper presents a one-parametric family of strictly convex nonsmooth compact sets such that the curves \(\Gamma\) obtained by the string construction are \(\mathcal{C}^2\)-smooth. The paper contains five very illustrative figures and four open problems related to billiard tables and caustics.
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