Chaotic properties for billiards in circular polygons

Abstract

We study billiards in domains enclosed by circular polygons. These are closed $C^1$ strictly convex curves formed by finitely many circular arcs. We prove the existence of a set in phase space, corresponding to generic sliding trajectories close enough to the boundary of the domain, in which the return billiard dynamics is semiconjugate to a transitive subshift on infinitely many symbols that contains the full $N$-shift as a topological factor for any $N\in \mathbb{N}$, so it has infinite topological entropy. We prove the existence of uncountably many asymptotic generic sliding trajectories approaching the boundary with optimal uniform linear speed, give an explicit exponentially big (in $q$) lower bound on the number of $q$-periodic trajectories as $q\to \infty$, and present an unusual property of the length spectrum. Our proofs are entirely analytical.

42 pages, 7 figures