Degenerate billiards

Abstract

In an ordinary billiard system, trajectories of a Hamiltonian system are elastically reflected after a collision with a hypersurface (scatterer). If the scatterer is a submanifold of codimension more than 1, we say that the billiard is degenerate. We study those trajectories of degenerate billiards that have an infinite number of collisions with the scatterer. Degenerate billiards appear as limits of systems with elastic reflections or as small-mass limits of systems with singularities in celestial mechanics. We prove the existence of trajectories of such systems that shadow the trajectories of the corresponding degenerate billiards. The proofs are based on a version of the method of an anti-integrable limit.