HAMILTONIAN BILLIARDS

Trajectories in bounded tables — chaos vs. integrability

Billiards: a point particle bouncing elastically off walls. Square/circle = integrable (regular orbits, conserved quantities). Ellipse = integrable (trajectories stay tangent to a confocal ellipse/hyperbola — caustics). Stadium (Bunimovich 1974) = fully chaotic (ergodic, mixing, positive Lyapunov exponent). Click to launch from that point.