We consider travelling times of billiard trajectories in the exterior of an obstacle K on a two-dimensional Riemannian manifold M. We prove that given two obstacles with almost the same travelling times, the generalised geodesic flows on the non-trapping parts of their respective phase-spaces will have a time-preserving conjugacy. Moreover, if M has non-positive sectional curvature we prove that if K and L are two obstacles with strictly convex boundaries and almost the same travelling times then K and L are identical.
The paper deals with some problems related to recovering information about an obstacle in an Euclidean space from certain measurements of lengths of generalized geodesics in the exterior of the obstacle. The main result is that if two obstacles satisfy some generic regularity conditions and have (almost) the same traveling times, then the generalized geodesic flows in their exteriors are conjugate on the non-trapping part of their phase spaces with a time preserving conjugacy. In the case of a union of two strictly convex domains in the plane, a constructive algorithm is described to recover the obstacle from traveling times.
A construction is given for the recovery of a disjoint union of strictly convex smooth planar obstacles from travelling-time information. The obstacles are required to be such that no Euclidean line meets more than two of them.
The generalization of Cohen and Glashows Very Special Relativity to curved space-times is considered. Gauging the SIM(2) symmetry does not, in general, provide the coupling to the gravitational background. However, locally SIM(2) invariant Lagrangians can always be constructed. For space-times with SIM(2) holonomy, they describe chiral fermions propagating freely as massive particles.
We prove that if two non-trapping obstacles in $mathbb{R}^n$ satisfy some rather weak non-degeneracy conditions and the scattering rays in their exteriors have (almost) the same travelling times or (almost) the same scattering length spectrum, then they coincide.
We describe the action of the fundamental group of a closed Finsler surface of negative curvature on the geodesics in the universal covering in terms of a flat symplectic connection and consider the first order deformation theory about a hyperbolic metric. A construction of O.Biquard yields a family of metrics which give nontrivial deformations of the holonomy, extending the representation of the fundamental group from SL(2,R) into the group of Hamiltonian diffeomorphisms of S^1 x R, and producing an infinite-dimensional version of Teichmuller space which contains the classical one.