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This work presents a framework for billiards in convex domains on two dimensional Riemannian manifolds. These domains are contained in connected, simply connected open subsets which are totally normal. In this context, some basic properties that have long been known for billiards on the plane are established. We prove the twist property and investigate conditions on the billiard for the existence and non existence of rotational invariant curves., Comment: We changed the title, from "The Twist Property and the Existence of Invariant Curves for Convex Billiards on Surfaces" to "On the role of the surface geometry in convex billiards"

In this text we study billiards on ovals and investigate some consequences of a rotational symmetry of the boundary on the dynamics. As it simplifies some calculations, the symmetry helps to obtain the results. We focus on periodic orbits with the same symmetry of the boundary which always exist and prove that in general half of them are elliptic and Moser stable and the other half are hyperbolic with homo(hetero)clinic intersections.

We study the non-persistence of horizontal invariant circles for geodesically convex perturbations of the geodesic circular billiard on surfaces of constant curvature and show that the result obtained by Ram\'irez-Ros for the planar case, remains true for billiards on surfaces with constant curvature., Comment: 7 pages, 2 figures

We consider a random billiard map, the one in which the standard specular reflection rule is replaced by a random reflection given by a Markov operator. We exhibit an invariant measure for random billiards on general tables. In the special case of a circular table we show that almost every (random) orbit is dense in the boundary as well as in the circular ring formed between the circle boundary and the random caustic. We additionally prove Strong Knudsen's Law for a particular case of families of absolutely continuous measures with respect to Liouville., Comment: 20 pages, 8 figures

We investigate theoretically if treatment alone can reduce the schistosomiasis's prevalence in an infected population, in a long-lasting sustainable way. We use a non-linear system of ordinary differential equations (a SI system combined with a logistic population growth) which describes the time evolution of the non-infected and infected populations, in terms of the recovering, infection, and demographic rates. Our model leads to the conclusion that the only way to eliminate this endemic disease is to implement public health policies aimed at both treatment and environment. We apply our model to the endemic area of Virgem das Gra\c{c}as, in Brazil, where the prevalence of Schistosiamisis in 2001 was greater than 50\%. The epidemiological data are extracted from a longitudinal study carried on the region between 2001 and 2010 and the demographic parameter from official Brazilian population data. When these estimated parameters are entered, our model gives a limit prevalence for Virgem das Gra\c{c}as of 11\%, which is still significantly high even though treatment in accordance to the government regulations is systematically performed. This estimative reinforces once again, that in order to eliminate Schistomiasis, public health policies aimed at treatment, sanitation, including snail control, and health education programs are mandatory., Comment: the pdf file has 10 pages. Includes 3 figures

In this paper we define and study the billiard problem on bounded regions on surfaces of constant curvature. We show that this problem defines a 2-dimensional conservative and reversible dynamical system, defined by a Twist diffeomorphism, if the boundary of the region is an oval. Using these properties and defining good perturbations for billiards, we show, in this new version, that having only a finite number of nondegenerate periodic orbits for each fixed period is an open property for billiards on surfaces of constant curvature and a dense one on the Euclidean and the hyperbolic planes. For the proof of the density, the techniques we use for the Euclidean and hyperbolic cases, do not work for the spherical case, due to a constraint (the perimeter of the polygonal trajectory being a multiple of {\pi}). We finish this paper studying the stability of these nondegenerate orbits., Comment: 11 pages, no figures

In recent papers, R. Bhatia, T. Jain and P. Grover obtained formulas for directional derivatives, of all orders, of the determinant, the permanent, the $m$-th compound map and the $m$-th induced power map. In this paper we generalize these results for immanants and for other symmetric powers of a matrix.

In this paper we present the exact value for the norm of directional derivatives, of all orders, for symmetric tensor powers of operators on finite dimensional vector spaces. Using this result we obtain an upper bound for the norm of all directional derivatives of immanants. This work is inspired in results by R. Bhatia, J. Dias da Silva, P. Grover and T. Jain.

Sufficiently differentiable oval billiards always have invariant rotational curves, but there are only two types of ovals with an invariant horizontal circle in its phase-space: the constant width ovals and some very special symmetric curves. In this work we study the dynamics near the horizontal circle for the billiard map of those two types of ovals, and show that the horizontal circle is approached, from both sides, by other invariant rotational curves. We will also describe some dynamical consequences., Comment: This paper has been withdrawn by the author as Lemma 7 is false and so the proof of the existence of invariant curves for symmetric billiard. The proof for constant width billliards is correct

Caustics are curves with the property that a billiard trajectory, once tangent to it, stays tangent after every reflection at the boundary of the billiard table. When the billiard table is an ellipse, any nonsingular billiard trajectory has a caustic, which can be either a confocal ellipse or a confocal hyperbola. Resonant caustics ---the ones whose tangent trajectories are closed polygons--- are destroyed under generic perturbations of the billiard table. We prove that none of the resonant elliptical caustics persists under a large class of explicit perturbations of the original ellipse. This result follows from a standard Melnikov argument and the analysis of the complex singularities of certain elliptic functions., Comment: 14 pages, 3 figures

Inspired by the work of Pujals and Sambarino on dominated splitting, we present billiards with a modified reflection law which constitute simple examples of dynamical systems with limit sets with dominated splitting and where the dynamics is a rational or irrational rotation., Comment: Revised version - 14 pages, 8 figures (higher resolution figures avaible at http://www.mat.ufmg.br/~syok/papers)

In this work we address the question of proving the stability of elliptic 2-periodic orbits for strictly convex billiards. Eventhough it is part of a widely accepted belief that ellipticity implies stability, classical theorems show that the certainty of stability relies upon more fine conditions. We present a review of the main results and general theorems and describe the procedure to fullfill the supplementary conditions for strictly convex billiards., Comment: for programs see http://www.mat.ufmg.br/~syok/papers

This paper addresses the question of genericity of existence of elliptic islands for the billiard map associated to strictly convex closed curves. More precisely, we study 2-periodic orbits of billiards associated to C5 closed and strictly convex curves and show that the existence of elliptic islands is a dense property on the subset of those billiards having an elliptic 2-periodic point. Our main tools are normal perturbations, the Birkhoff Normal Form for elliptic fixed points and Moser's Twist Theorem., Comment: 12 pages, 6 figures

We investigate the existence of elliptic islands for a special family of periodic orbits of a two-parameter family of maps corresponding to the billiard problem on the elliptical stadium. The hyperbolic or elliptical character of these orbits is also investigated. Depending on the parameters, we obtain upper bounds of ellipticity for this special family as a lower bound for chaos. On a different region of the parameter space, we can prove that there is no upper bound for the existence of elliptic islands. The main results we use are Birkhoff Normal Form and Moser's Twist Theorem., Comment: 12 pages, 6 ps figures

The Breathing Circle is a 2-dimensional generalization of the Fermi Accelerator. It is shown that the billiard map associated to this model has invariant curves in phase space, implying that any particle will have bounded gain of energy., Comment: 9 pages, 2 figures

The elliptical stadium is a plane region bounded by a curve constructed by joining two half-ellipses by two parallel segments of equal length. The billiard inside it, as a map, generates a two parameters family of dynamical systems. It is known that the system is ergodic for a certain region of the parameter space. In this work we study the stability of a particular family of periodic orbits obtaining good bounds for the chaotic zone., Comment: 13 pages, LaTeX. 7 postscript low resolution figures included. High resolution figures avaiable under request to syok@mat.ufmg.br

The elliptical stadium is a curve constructed by joining two half-ellipses, with half axes a>1 and b=1, by two straight segments of equal length 2h. In this work we find bounds on h, for a close to 1, to assure the positiveness of a Lyapunov exponent. We conclude that, for these values of a and h, the elliptical stadium billiard mapping is ergodic and has the K-property., Comment: LaTeX, 19 pages, 7 figures and legends stored in uuencoded file