Billiards in ideal hyperbolic polygons

DOI10.3934/DCDS.2011.29.893MaRDI QIDQ632346zbMATH OpenOpenAlexFDO

Authors Simon Castle, Norbert Peyerimhoff, Karl Friedrich Siburg

Publication date 15 March 2011

Published in Discrete and Continuous Dynamical Systems (Search for Journal in Brave)

Copyright license Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International

Full work available at URL https://doi.org/10.3934/dcds.2011.29.893

zbMATH Keywords

billiardshyperbolic polygonsperiodic trajectories

Mathematics Subject Classification ID

Periodic orbits of vector fields and flows (37C27) Dynamical systems of geometric origin and hyperbolicity (geodesic and horocycle flows, etc.) (37D40) Non-Euclidean differential geometry (53A35)

Review text

Given a polygon of the hyperbolic plane with ideal vertices, the paper under review considers billiards in ideal hyperbolic polygons. The authors state a nice conjecture about minimal average lengths of cyclically related trajectories and prove it in some cases using elementary arguments. It is proved that a trajectory is uniquely determined by the bi-infinite sequence of sides of the polygons that encounters the trajectory. The first main result characterizes which sequences code a trajectory. This characterization was already proved by \textit{M.-J. Giannoni} and \textit{D. Ullmo} in [Physica D 41, No. 3, 371--390 (1990; Zbl 0703.58039)], though a different geometric proof is provided here. Two periodic trajectories are cyclically related if their sequences of sides are related by a cyclic permutation. Notice that this is not the usual shift in dynamics that gives the same periodic trajectory. The average length of a periodic trajectory is the average of the lengths of all cyclically related periodic trajectories. The following conjecture is stated in the paper: for any periodic trajectory, the average length is uniquely minimized by the regular ideal hyperbolic polygon. This is a beautiful characterization of the regular polygon in the moduli space of ideal polygons (that is a cell of dimension \(n-3\), where \(n\) denotes the number of vertices). Some cases of this conjecture are proved in the paper using elementary and nice arguments of hyperbolic trigonometry, Möbius transformations and symmetry.

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Cited in

(9)

• Billiards with Pesin region of measure one
• Finiteness in polygonal billiards on hyperbolic plane
• Billiards on Pythagorean triples and their Minkowski functions
• Billiard characterization of spheres
• Minimizing length of billiard trajectories in hyperbolic polygons
• Multidimensional hyperbolic billiards
• A Triple of Projective Billiards
• Coding billiards in hyperbolic 3-space
• Minimising length of closed billiard trajectories on hyperbolic polygons

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