Islands Appearing in Dispersing Billiards with Steep Potentials

Vered Rom-Kedar, Weizmann Institute and IPAM

A common model in physics is to replace a mechanical Hamiltonian system with a steep potential by an inertial motion in the corresponding domain with specular reflections This type of dynamics is named billiard motion. The most celebrated model of this kind is related to Boltzmann's hypothesis, i are replaced by hard spheres. When is such an approximation justified? What type of ne arise when the approximation fails? In recent years we have developed a framework for mainly for two dimensional systems. I will survey these developments and some recent e are observed.

This is a joint work with Dmitry Turaev.