Symplectic capacity and short periodic billiard trajectory

Abstract

We prove that a bounded domain $\Omega$ in $\R^n$ with smooth boundary has a periodic billiard trajectory with at most $n+1$ bounce times and of length less than $C_n r(\Omega)$, where $C_n$ is a positive constant which depends only on $n$, and $r(\Omega)$ is the supremum of radius of balls in $\Omega$. This result improves the result by C.Viterbo, which asserts that $\Omega$ has a periodic billiard trajectory of length less than C'_n \vol(\Omega)^{1/n}. To prove this result, we study symplectic capacity of Liouville domains, which is defined via symplectic homology.Comment: 32 pages, final version with minor modifications. Published online in Mathematische Zeitschrif