Ergodicity of the generalized lemon billiards

Abstract

In this paper, we study a two-parameter family of convex billiard tables, by taking the intersection of two round disks (with different radii) in the plane. These tables give a generalization of the one-parameter family of lemon-shaped billiards. Initially, there is only one ergodic table among all lemon tables. In our generalized family, we observe numerically the prevalence of ergodicity among the some perturbations of that table. Moreover, numerical estimates of the mixing rate of the billiard dynamics on some ergodic tables are also provided.