### Billiards and steep potentials Vered Rom-Kedar


The behavior of a point particle travelling with
a constant speed in a region $D$, undergoing elastic
collisions at the regions's boundary, is known as the
billiard problem. In many applications (molecular dynamics,
cold atoms optical traps, etc.), the billiard's flow is
a simplified model which imitates the conservative motion
of a particle in a smooth steep potential $V_{\varepsilon}$,
which, in the limit $\varepsilon\rightarrow0$, becomes
a hard-wall potential. Indeed, one of the underlying
assumptions of Boltzman hypothesis is that molecules
behave as hard spheres.

We study rigorously this limit (for arbitrary geometry
and dimension); on one hand, for regular reflections,
under some natural assumptions on $V_{\varepsilon}$,
we provide the asymptotic expansion of the smooth
solutions in terms of auxiliary billiard approximations,
with error estimates which are small in the $C^{r}$ norm.
This seemingly mathematical exercise proves to provide
a powerful tool for comparing between the smooth and
the billiard's flow.

On the other hand, in two dimensions, we proved that
tangent periodic orbits and corner polygons produce
stability islands even in dispersing geometries for
which the billiards are mixing. Recently, we
demonstrated numerically that some smooth three degrees
of freedom Hamiltonian systems which are arbitrarily
close to three dimensional dispersing billiards have
islands of effective stability, and hence are non-ergodic.

Joint works with A. Rapoport and D. Turaev.