On the Density of Dispersing Billiard Systems with Singular Periodic Orbits

Abstract

Dynamical billiards, or the behavior of a particle traveling in a planar region D undergoing elastic collisions with the boundary has been extensively studied and is used to model many physical phenomena such as a Boltzmann gas. Of particular interest are the dispersing billiards, where D consists of a union of finitely many open convex regions. These billiard flows are known to be ergodic and to possess the K-property. However, Turaev and Rom-Kedar proved that for dispersing systems permitting singular periodic orbits, there exists a family of smooth Hamiltonian flows with regions of stability near such orbits, converging to the billiard flow. They conjecture that systems possessing such singular periodic orbits are dense in the space of all dispersing billiard systems and remark that if this conjecture is true then every dispersing billiard system is arbitrarily close to a non-ergodic smooth Hamiltonian flow with regions of stability [6]. We present a partial solution to this conjecture by showing that any system with a near-singular periodic orbit satisfying certain conditions can be perturbed to a system that permits a singular periodic orbit. We comment on the assumptions of our theorem that must be removed to prove the conjecture of Turaev and Rom-Kedar.