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Polygonal billiards and "optical tori"

2015/07/16 by Eduardo Díaz-Miguel, Díaz-Miguel, Eduardo
Physics and Astronomy · Mathematics · #Quantum chaos and dynamical systems #Mathematical Dynamics and Fractals #Mathematics and Applications

paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1507.06635

Abstract

We give an optical physicist view of the problem of the trajectories in a polygonal billiard using only basic facts of Optics and the theory of functions of a complex variable. This approach allow us to stablish a certain correspondence between n-gon billiards and one-holed 2n-punctured tori. Therefore the existence of periodic trajectories in a certain polygon becomes the problem of the existence of closed geodesics in its associated torus.

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