Published Online: 21 June 2012
Accepted: March 2012
Chaos 22, 026106 (2012); https://doi.org/10.1063/1.3701992
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The purpose of this paper is to study the dynamics of a square billiard with a non-standard reflection law such that the angle of reflection of the particle is a linear contraction of the angle of incidence. We present numerical and analytical arguments that the nonwandering set of this billiard decomposes into three invariant sets, a parabolic attractor, a chaotic attractor, and a set consisting of several horseshoes. This scenario implies the positivity of the topological entropy of the billiard, a property that is in sharp contrast with the integrability of the square billiard with the standard reflection law.
The authors were supported by Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia through the Program POCI 2010 and the Project “Randomness in Deterministic Dynamical Systems and Applications” (PTDC-MAT-105448-2008). G.D.M. would like to thank M. Lenci and R. Markarian for useful discussions.
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