We study stochastic billiards on general tables: a particle moves
according to its constant velocity inside some domain D
until it hits the boundary and bounces randomly inside according
to some reflection law.
We assume that the boundary of the domain is locally Lipschitz
and almost everywhere continuously differentiable. The angle of the
outgoing velocity with the inner normal vector
has a specified, absolutely continuous density. We construct
the discrete time and the continuous time processes recording the
sequence of hitting points on the boundary and the pair location/velocity.
We mainly focus on the case of bounded domains. Then, we prove exponential
ergodicity of these two Markov processes, we study their invariant
distribution and their normal (Gaussian) fluctuations.
Of particular interest is
the case of the cosine reflection law: the stationary distributions
for the two processes are uniform in this case, the
discrete time chain is reversible though the continuous time
process is quasi-reversible. Also in this case, we give a natural
construction of a chord ``picked at random'' in D, and we study
the angle of intersection of the process with a (d-1)-dimensional
manifold contained in D.
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