Capillary floating and the billiard ball problem

Abstract

We establish a connection between capillary floating in neutral equilibrium and the billiard ball problem. This allows us to reduce the question of floating in neutral equilibrium at any orientation with a prescribed contact angle for infinite homogeneous cylinders to a question about billiard caustics for their orthogonal cross-sections. We solve the billiard problem. As an application, we characterize the possible contact angles and exhibit an infinite family of real analytic non-round cylinders that float in neutral equilibrium at any orientation with constant contact angles.

31 pages, 8 figures

References in corpus (1)

• Geometry, topology and dynamics of geodesic flows on noncompact polygonal surfaces

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