The Wave Trace and Birkhoff Billiards

TL;DR

This paper develops an explicit Hadamard-Riesz type parametrix for the wave propagator in convex billiard domains, enabling precise wave trace formulas and principal symbol computations related to billiard dynamics.

Contribution

It introduces the first explicit formulas for the wave trace principal symbol in convex billiards, correcting previous inconsistencies and providing localized trace formulas near various periodic orbits.

Findings

Derived explicit wave trace formulas for convex billiards.

Computed principal symbols explicitly in terms of geometric billiard data.

Corrected previous inconsistencies in wave invariants' principal symbol order.

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to develop a Hadamard-Riesz type parametrix for the wave propagator in bounded planar domains with smooth, strictly convex boundary. This parametrix then allows us to rederive an oscillatory integral representation for the wave trace appearing in \cite{MaMe82} and compute its principal symbol explicitly in terms of geometric data associated to the billiard map. This results in new formulas for the wave invariants. The order of the principal symbol, which appears to be inconsistent in the works of \cite{MaMe82} and \cite{Popov1994}, is also corrected. In those papers, the principal symbol was never actually computed and to our knowledge, this paper contains the first explicit formulas for the principal symbol of the wave trace. The wave trace formulas we provide are localized near both simple lengths corresponding to nondegenerate periodic orbits and degenerate lengths associated to one parameter families of periodic orbits tangent to a single rational caustic. Existence of a Hadamard-Riesz type parametrix with explicit symbol and phase calculations in the interior appears to be new in the literature, with the exception of the author's previous work \cite{Vig18} in the special case of elliptical domains. This allows us to circumvent the symbol calculus in \cite{DuGu75} and \cite{HeZe12} when computing trace formulas, which are instead derived from integrating our explicit parametrix over the diagonal.