| |
|
Edoh Y. Amiran
Integrable Smooth Planar Billiards and Evolutes
|
|
Published: |
April 21, 1997 |
Keywords: |
Billiard ball map, integrable, KAM, caustics, ellipse |
Subject: |
primary 58F17, secondary 53C22 |
|
|
Abstract
Any elliptic region is an example of an integrable domain: the
set of tangents to a confocal ellipse or hyperbola remains invariant
under reflection across the normal to the boundary. The main result states
that when Ω is a strictly convex bounded planar domain with a
smooth boundary and is integrable near the boundary, its boundary is
necessarily an ellipse. The proof is based on the fact that ellipses satisfy a
certain "transitivity property", and that this characterizes ellipses
among smooth strictly convex closed planar curves. To establish the
transitivity property, KAM theory is used with a perturbation of the
integrable billiard map.
|
|
Author information
Mathematics Department
Western Washington University
Bellingham, WA 98225-9063
edoh@cc.wwu.edu
|
|