Exploration of billiards with Keplerian potential

TL;DR

This paper investigates elliptic billiards with Keplerian potentials, analyzing both reflective and refractive cases, and provides new insights into their dynamics, stability, and bifurcations through numerical and theoretical methods.

Contribution

It extends previous studies by analyzing the non-focused reflective case and the refractive case, offering new numerical and theoretical results on stability and bifurcations.

Findings

Analysis of non-focused reflective billiards completes previous work.

Numerical analysis of refractive billiards reveals complex dynamics.

Theoretical results on stability and bifurcations of equilibrium orbits.

Abstract

We study a class of elliptic billiards with a Keplerian potential inside, considering two cases: a reflective one, where the particle reflects elastically on the boundary, and a refractive one, where the particle can cross the billiard's boundary entering a region with a harmonic potential. In the latter case the dynamics is therefore given by concatenations of inner and outer arcs, connected by a refraction law. In recent papers (e.g. arXiv:2105.02108, arXiv:2108.11159, arXiv:2212.01150, arXiv:2110.03376) these billiards have been extensively studied in order to identify which conditions give rise to either regular or chaotic dynamics. In this paper we complete the study by analysing the non focused reflective case, thus complementing the results obtained in arXiv:2110.03376 in the focused one. We then analyse the focused and non focused refractive case, where no results on integrability are known except for the centred circular case, by providing an extensive numerical analysis. We present also a theoretical result regarding the linear stability of homothetic equilibrium orbits in the reflective case for general ellipses, highlighting the possible presence of bifurcations even in the integrable framework.