• Date:  2024-08-22 (Thu)  10:30 ~ 12:00
• Place:  129-406 (SNU)
• Speaker:  Peter Albers  (Universität Heidelberg)

• Title:  Outer symplectic billiard

• Abstract:   We introduce a new type of billiard dynamics about an arbitrary submanifold inside a symplectic vector space. While the definition is direct and elementary, this billiard map is motivated by a (loose) analogy/translation from the standard Euclidean billiard. We study basic dynamic questions e.g. concerning existence of periodic orbits etc. Then we explore two interesting cases, where the submanifold is a curve respectively a Lagrangian submanifold. The latter has an intriguing connection to a theorem by Hopf from 1940.

The talk does not assume prior knowledge of billiards and only rather basic knowledge of (linear) symplectic geometry. This is joint work with Ana Chavez-Caliz and Sergei Tabachnikov.