Breaking of invariant curves: from the Fermi-Ulam map to the breathing circle billiard

Abstract

We consider the breathing circle billiard, in which a point particle moves freely inside a disk. The radius varies periodically in time, with elastic reflections at the moving boundary. In this system the angular momentum is preserved, and fixing its value $c$ reduces the dynamics to a two-dimensional exact symplectic map on a cylinder. In the high-energy regime this map is a twist map generated by a diagonally periodic generating function $h_c$. We study the small angular momentum regime as a perturbation of the limiting case $c=0$, which corresponds to the Fermi-Ulam dynamics along a diameter. Using this perturbative structure and a quantitative version of Mather's converse-KAM criterion, we exclude invariant Lipschitz graphs for suitable rotation numbers. Combined with Aubry-Mather theory and Forni's theorem, this yields positive topological entropy for sufficiently small $c\ge 0$. Our result improves previous similar results obtained via the standard Mather's converse-KAM criterion by giving a sharper quantitative threshold for the destruction of invariant curves.