Billiard trajectories inside Cones

Abstract

Recently it was proved that every billiard trajectory inside a $C^3$ convex cone has a finite number of reflections. Here, by a $C^3$ convex cone, we mean a cone whose section with some hyperplane is a strictly convex closed $C^3$ submanifold of the hyperplane with nondegenerate second fundamental form. In this paper, we prove the existence of $C^2$ convex cones admitting billiard trajectories with infinitely many reflections in finite time. We also estimate the number of reflections of billiard trajectories in elliptic cones in ${\mathbb{R}}^3$ using two first integrals.

25 pages