Non-persistence of resonant caustics in perturbed elliptic billiards

DOI10.1017/S0143385712000417zbMATH Open1408.37065arXiv1108.5582MaRDI QIDQ2874008FDOQ2874008

Authors: Sônia Pinto-De-Carvalho, Rafael Ramírez-Ros 

Publication date: 28 January 2014

Published in: Ergodic Theory and Dynamical Systems (Search for Journal in Brave)

Abstract: Caustics are curves with the property that a billiard trajectory, once tangent to it, stays tangent after every reflection at the boundary of the billiard table. When the billiard table is an ellipse, any nonsingular billiard trajectory has a caustic, which can be either a confocal ellipse or a confocal hyperbola. Resonant caustics ---the ones whose tangent trajectories are closed polygons--- are destroyed under generic perturbations of the billiard table. We prove that none of the resonant elliptical caustics persists under a large class of explicit perturbations of the original ellipse. This result follows from a standard Melnikov argument and the analysis of the complex singularities of certain elliptic functions.

Full work available at URL: https://arxiv.org/abs/1108.5582

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Mathematics Subject Classification ID

Dynamical aspects of twist maps (37E40)

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Cited In (13)

• The billiard inside an ellipse deformed by the curvature flow
• Break-up of resonant invariant curves in billiards and dual billiards associated to perturbed circular tables
• Beltrami fields with hyperbolic periodic orbits enclosed by knotted invariant tori
• The first \(p\)-widths of the unit disk
• On the local Birkhoff conjecture for convex billiards
• On the fragility of periodic tori for families of symplectic twist maps
• Nearly circular domains which are integrable close to the boundary are ellipses
• Resonant phenomena in slowly perturbed elliptic billiards
• On the integrability of strictly convex billiard tables with boundaries close to ellipses with small eccentricities
• On the length and area spectrum of analytic convex domains
• An integrable deformation of an ellipse of small eccentricity is an ellipse
• One can hear the shape of ellipses of small eccentricity
• Exponentially Small Asymptotic Formulas for the Length Spectrum in Some Billiard Tables

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