On another edge of defocusing: hyperbolicity of asymmetric lemon billiards

Leonid Bunimovich, Hong-Kun Zhang, Pengfei Zhang

Published 2014-11-30Version 1

It is well known that a way to construct chaotic (hyperbolic) billiards with focusing components is to place all regular components of the boundary of a billiard table sufficiently far away from the each focusing component. If all focusing components of the boundary of the billiard table are circular arcs, then the above condition states that all circles obtained by completion of focusing components to full circles belong to the billiard table. In the present paper we show that defocusing mechanism may generate hyperbolicity even in the case when this condition is strongly violated. We demonstrate that by proving that a class of convex tables--asymmetric lemons, whose boundary consists of two circular arcs, generate hyperbolic billiards. In such billiards the circle completing one of the boundary arcs contains the entire billiard table. Therefore this result is quite surprising because in our billiards, the focusing components are extremely close to each other, and because these tables are perturbations of the first convex ergodic billiard constructed more than forty years ago.