Pseudo-integrable billiards and arithmetic dynamics

We introduce a new class of billiard systems in the plane, with boundaries formed by finitely many arcs of confocal conics such that they contain some reflex angles. Fundamental dynamical, topological, geometric, and arithmetic properties of such billiards are studied. The novelty, caused by reflex angles on boundary, induces invariant leaves of higher genera and dynamical behaviour different from Liouville-Arnold's theorem. Its analogue is derived from the Maier theorem on measured foliations. A local version of Poncelet theorem is formulated and necessary algebro-geometric conditions for periodicity are presented. The connection with interval exchange transformation is established together with Keane's type conditions for minimality. It is proved that the dynamics depends on arithmetic of rotation numbers, but not on geometry of a given confocal pencil of conics.


Our aim
Billiard dynamics in a domain bounded by arcs of a few confocal conics containing reflex angles on the boundary.

Main example
A domain bounded by two confocal ellipses and two segments placed on the smaller axis of theirs. We fix a caustic to be an ellipse completely contained in the domain.
Billiard trajectories are placed in the the ring between the billiard border and the caustic.
Each point of the ring is the projection of four points from the phase space.
The corresponding leaf of the phase space is naturally decomposed into four such rings, which are glued to each other along the border arcs.
The leaf is an orientable surface of genus 3 Circles with rotation numbers 1 3 and 1 4 The domain with two concentric half-circles of radii 2R, R √ 2 and the corresponding segments; the caustic with radius R.
There exist six trajectories connecting singular points corresponding to concave angles of the boundary.

a) b) c)
Vertices of the saddle connections divide the billiard border into thirteen parts.
All trajectories are periodic: ◮ either all bouncing points of a given trajectory are in gray parts -the billiard particle hits twice each gray part. It is 12-periodic: four bounces on the smaller circle, six bounces on the bigger one, and one on each of the segments on the y -axis; ◮ or all bouncing points are in orange parts -the particle will hit each part once; it is 7-periodic: it hits three times the bigger circle and four times the smaller one.
The corresponding level set in the phase space is divided by the saddle-connections into three parts: ◮ the part containing all 12-periodic trajectories: this part is bounded by four saddle-connections; ◮ two parts containing all 7-periodic trajectories winding about the caustic in the clockwise and counterclockwise direction: these parts are bounded by saddle-connections winding in the same direction.

Local Poncelet porisms
For the billiard within one ellipse the famous Poncelet porism holds: (A) if there is a periodic billiard trajectory with one initial point of the boundary, then there are infinitely many such periodic trajectories with the same period, sharing the same caustic; (B) even more is true, if there is one periodic trajectory, then all trajectories sharing the same caustic are periodic with the same period.
For domains bounded with more than one confocal conic (A) is still generally true. However, (B) is not true any more. The Poncelet porism is true locally, but not globally.

Maier's theorem (1943) vs. Liouville-Arnol'd's theorem
The theory of measured foliations in pseudo-billiard context leads to a version of the Poncelet theorem.
such that they satisfy: ◮ if one billiard trajectory with bouncing points within D k is periodic, then all such trajectories are periodic with period n k . Moreover, n k is a multiple of d k and every such a trajectory bounces the same number n k d k of times off each arc ℓ k j ; ◮ if billiard trajectories having vertices in D k are non-periodic, then the bouncing points of each trajectory are dense in D k .
In either case, the boundary of D k consists of bouncing points of saddle connections.

Necessary conditions for periodicity
The confocal family Cayley-type condition, obtained by application of [V. D, M.Radnović, J.

Phys. A (2004)]
Consider domain D bounded by half-ellipses C β 1 and C β 2 and two corresponding segments belonging to y -axis. A necessary condition for the existence of a billiard trajectory within D with C α 0 as a caustic which becomes closed after n 1 reflections off C β 1 and n 2 reflections off C β 2 is: A -the Abel-Jacobi map of the ellitic curve:

Interval exchange transformation
The part of the boundary where the billiard particle is going to hit depends on the direction of motion and the touching point with the caustic.

Interval exchange transformation
To see the billiard dynamics as an interval exchange transformation, we make the following identification: In other words: ◮ we identify the joint point X of a given trajectory with the caustic with p(X ) ∈ [0, 1) if the particle is moving in the counterclockwise direction on the corresponding segment; ◮ for the motion in the clockwise direction, we identify X with q(X ) ∈ [−1, 0).
p(X ) and q(X ) are natural parametrizations of the caustic with respect to the invariant measure corresponding to the billiard dynamics.

Pencil independence -arithmetic dynamics
The interval exchange transformations depends only on the rotation numbers r 1 , r 2 .

Theorem [V. D, M. Radnović (2012)]
The billiard dynamics inside the domain D with an ellipse as the caustic, does not depend on the confocal family but only on rotation numbers r 1 , r 2 .