Periodic billiard trajectories in polyhedra

Nicolas Bedaride

Published 2011-04-06Version 1

We consider the billiard map inside a polyhedron. We give a condition for the stability of the periodic trajectories. We apply this result to the case of the tetrahedron. We deduce the existence of an open set of tetrahedra which have a periodic orbit of length four (generalization of Fagnano's orbit for triangles), moreover we can study completly the orbit of points along this coding.