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Elliptic islands in strictly convex billiards

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 June 2003

MÁRIO JORGE DIAS CARNEIRO
Affiliation:
Departamento de Matemática, ICEx, UFMG 30.123–970, Belo Horizonte, Brasil (e-mail: carneiro@mat.ufmg.br, syok@mat.ufmg.br, sonia@mat.ufmg.br)
SYLVIE OLIFFSON KAMPHORST
Affiliation:
Departamento de Matemática, ICEx, UFMG 30.123–970, Belo Horizonte, Brasil (e-mail: carneiro@mat.ufmg.br, syok@mat.ufmg.br, sonia@mat.ufmg.br)
SÔNIA PINTO DE CARVALHO
Affiliation:
Departamento de Matemática, ICEx, UFMG 30.123–970, Belo Horizonte, Brasil (e-mail: carneiro@mat.ufmg.br, syok@mat.ufmg.br, sonia@mat.ufmg.br)

Abstract

This paper addresses the question of genericity of existence of elliptic islands for the billiard map associated to strictly convex closed curves. More precisely, we study 2-periodic orbits of billiards associated to C^5 closed and strictly convex curves and show that the existence of elliptic islands is a dense property on the subset of those billiards having an elliptic 2-periodic point.

Our main tools are normal perturbations, the Birkhoff Normal Form for elliptic fixed points and Moser's Twist Theorem. In order to perform some of the long computations involved, Maple^{\circledR} software was employed.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
2003 Cambridge University Press

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