Pseudo-Riemannian geodesics and billiards

Many classical facts in Riemannian geometry have their pseudo-Riemannian analogs. For instance, the spaces of space-like and time-like geodesics on a pseudo-Riemannian manifold have natural symplectic structures (just like in the Riemannian case), while the space of light-like geodesics has a natural contact structure. We discuss the geometry of these structures in detail, as well as introduce and study pseudo-Euclidean billiards. In particular, we prove pseudo-Euclidean analogs of the Jacobi-Chasles theorems and show the integrability of the billiard in the ellipsoid and the geodesic flow on the ellipsoid in a pseudo-Euclidean space.Comment: title abbreviated, text edited; to appear in Advances in Mathematic

Contact complete integrability

Complete integrability in a symplectic setting means the existence of a Lagrangian foliation leaf-wise preserved by the dynamics. In the paper we describe complete integrability in a contact set-up as a more subtle structure: a flag of two foliations, Legendrian and co-Legendrian, and a holonomy-invariant transverse measure of the former in the latter. This turns out to be equivalent to the existence of a canonical $\R\ltimes \R^{n-1}$ structure on the leaves of the co-Legendrian foliation. Further, the above structure implies the existence of $n$ contact fields preserving a special contact 1-form, thus providing the geometric framework and establishing equivalence with previously known definitions of contact integrability. We also show that contact completely integrable systems are solvable in quadratures. We present an example of contact complete integrability: the billiard system inside an ellipsoid in pseudo-Euclidean space, restricted to the space of oriented null geodesics. We describe a surprising acceleration mechanism for closed light-like billiard trajectories

Arithmetical Chaos and Quantum Cosmology

In this note, we present the formalism to start a quantum analysis for the recent billiard representation introduced by Damour, Henneaux and Nicolai in the study of the cosmological singularity. In particular we use the theory of Maass automorphic forms and recent mathematical results about arithmetical dynamical systems. The predictions of the billiard model give precise automorphic properties for the wave function (Maass-Hecke eigenform), the asymptotic number of quantum states (Selberg asymptotics for PSL(2,Z)), the distribution for the level spacing statistics (the Poissonian one) and the absence of scarred states. The most interesting implication of this model is perhaps that the discrete spectrum is fully embedded in the continuous one.Comment: 35 pages, 4 figures. to be published on Classical and Quantum Gravity (scheduled for January 2009