Evolutionary force billiards

Abstract

A new class of integrable billiards has been introduced: evolutionary force billiards. They depend on a parameter and change their topology as energy (time) increases. It has been proved that they realize some important integrable systems with two degrees of freedom on the entire symplectic four-dimensional phase manifold at a time, rather than on only individual isoenergy 3-surfaces. For instance, this occurs in the Euler and Lagrange cases. It has also been proved that these two well-known systems are "billiard-equivalent", despite the fact that the former one is square integrable, and the latter one allows a linear integral.