Maximal Codimension Collisions and Invariant Measures for Hard Spheres on a Line

Abstract

For any $$N\ge 3$$ N ≥ 3 , we study invariant measures of the dynamics of N hard spheres whose centres are constrained to lie on a line. In particular, we study the invariant submanifold $$\mathcal {M}$$ M of the tangent bundle of the hard sphere billiard table comprising initial data that lead to the simultaneous collision of all N hard spheres. Firstly, we obtain a characterisation of those continuously-differentiable N-body scattering maps which generate a billiard dynamics on $$\mathcal {M}$$ M admitting a canonical weighted Hausdorff measure on $$\mathcal {M}$$ M (that we term the Liouville measure on$$\mathcal {M}$$ M ) as an invariant measure. We do this by deriving a second boundary-value problem for a fully nonlinear PDE that all such scattering maps satisfy by necessity. Secondly, by solving a family of functional equations, we find sufficient conditions on measures which are absolutely continuous with respect to the Hausdorff measure in order that they be invariant for billiard flows that conserve momentum and energy. Finally, we show that the unique momentum- and energy-conserving linearN-body scattering map yields a billiard dynamics which admits the Liouville measure on $$\mathcal {M}$$ M as an invariant measure.