Periodic billiard trajectories and Morse theory on loop spaces

DOI10.4171/CMH/352MaRDI QIDQ2339710zbMATH OpenFDO

Authors Kei Irie

Publication date 2 April 2015

Published in Commentarii Mathematici Helvetici (Search for Journal in Brave)

Full work available at URL https://arxiv.org/abs/1403.1953

zbMATH Keywords

loop spaceperiodic billiard trajectory

Mathematics Subject Classification ID

Convex sets in (n) dimensions (including convex hypersurfaces) (52A20) Periodic and almost periodic solutions for problems in Hamiltonian and Lagrangian mechanics (70H12)

Abstract: We study periodic billiard trajectories on a compact Riemannian manifold with boundary, by applying Morse theory to Lagrangian action functionals on the loop space of the manifold. Based on the approximation method due to Benci-Giannoni, we prove that nonvanishing of relative homology of a certain pair of loop spaces implies the existence of a periodic billiard trajectory. We also prove a parallel result for path spaces. We apply those results to show the existence of short billiard trajectories and short geodesic loops. We also recover two known results on the length of a shortest periodic billiard trajectory on a convex body: Ghomi's inequality, and Brunn-Minkowski type inequality due to Artstein-Ostrover.

Review text

Summary: We study periodic billiard trajectories on a compact Riemannian manifold with boundary by applying Morse theory to Lagrangian action functionals on the loop space of the manifold. Based on the approximation method proposed by Benci-Giannoni, we prove that nonvanishing of relative homology of a certain pair of loop spaces implies the existence of a periodic billiard trajectory. We also prove a parallel result for path spaces. We apply those results to show the existence of short billiard trajectories and short geodesic loops. Further, we recover two known results on the length of a shortest periodic billiard trajectory in a convex body: Ghomi's inequality, and Brunn-Minkowski type inequality proposed by Artstein-Avidan-Ostrover.

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