Static and time-dependent perturbations of the classical elliptical billiard

Abstract

The elliptical billiard problem defines a two-dimensional integrable discrete dynamical system. Integrability not being a robust property, we study some static and time-dependent perturbations of this problem. For the static case, we observe the transition from integrability to chaos, on some perturbations of the ellipse. Then we study time-dependent perturbations, supposing that the boundary deforms periodically with the time, remaining always an ellipse. We investigate numerically the now four-dimensional phase space, looking mainly at the question of whether or not the velocity of a given trajectory may increase indefinitely.