Track billiards

Abstract

We study a class of planar billiards having the remarkable property that their phase space consists up to a set of zero measure of two invariant sets formed by orbits moving in opposite directions. The tables of these billiards are tubular neighborhoods of differentiable Jordan curves that are unions of finitely many segments and arcs of circles. We prove that under proper conditions on the segments and the arcs, the billiards considered have non-zero Lyapunov exponents almost everywhere. These results are then extended to a similar class of 3-dimensional billiards. Interestingly, we find that for some track billiards, the mechanism generating hyperbolicity is not the defocusing one, which requires every infinitesimal beam of parallel rays to defocus after every reflection off of the focusing boundary.