Convex billiards on convex spheres

Abstract

In this paper we study the dynamical billiards on a convex 2D sphere. We investigate some generic properties of the convex billiards on a general convex sphere. We prove that $C^{\infty }$ generically, every periodic point is either hyperbolic or elliptic with irrational rotation number. Moreover, every hyperbolic periodic point admits some transverse homoclinic intersections. A new ingredient in our approach is that we use Herman's result on Diophantine invariant curves to prove the nonlinear stability of elliptic periodic points for a dense subset of convex billiards.

20 pages, 2 figures