Cusps of caustics by reflection in ellipses - Archive ouverte HAL
Article Dans Une Revue Journal of the London Mathematical Society Année : 2024

Cusps of caustics by reflection in ellipses

Résumé

This paper is concerned with the billiard version of Jacobi's last geometric statement and its generalizations. Given a non-focal point $O$ inside an elliptic billiard table, one considers the family of rays emanating from $O$ and the caustic $\Gamma_n$ of the reflected family after $n$ reflections off the ellipse, for each positive integer $n$. It is known that $\Gamma_n$ has at least four cusps and it has been conjectured that it has exactly four (ordinary) cusps. The present paper presents a proof of this conjecture in the special case when the ellipse is a circle. In the case of an arbitrary ellipse, we give an explicit description of the location of four of the cusps of $\Gamma_n$, though we do not prove that these are the only cusps.

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Dates et versions

hal-04784112 , version 1 (14-11-2024)

Identifiants

Citer

Gil Bor, Mark Spivakovsky, Serge Tabachnikov. Cusps of caustics by reflection in ellipses. Journal of the London Mathematical Society, 2024, 110 (6), ⟨10.1112/jlms.70033⟩. ⟨hal-04784112⟩
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