Integrability and ergodicity of classical billiards in a magnetic field

Abstract

We consider classical billiards in plane, connected, but not necessarily bounded domains. The charged billiard ball is immersed in a homogeneous, stationary magnetic field perpendicular to the plane. The part of dynamics which is not trivially integrable can be described by a “bouncing map”. We compute a general expression for the Jacobian matrix of this map, which allows us to determine stability and bifurcation values of specific periodic orbits. In some cases, the bouncing map is a twist map and admits a generating function. We give a general form for this function which is useful to do perturbative calculations and to classify periodic orbits. We prove that billiards in convex domains with sufficiently smooth boundaries possess invariant tori corresponding to skipping trajectories. Moreover, in strong field we construct adiabatic invariants over exponentially large times. To some extent, these results remain true for a class of nonconvex billiards. On the other hand, we present evidence that the billiard in a square is ergodic for some large enough values of the magnetic field. A numerical study reveals that the scattering on two circles is essentially chaotic.