The wave trace and Birkhoff billiards

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to develop a Hadamard-Riesz type parametrix for the wave propagator in bounded planar domains with smooth, strictly convex boundary. This parametrix then allows us to rederive an oscillatory integral representation for the wave trace appearing in \cite{MaMe82} and compute its principal symbol explicitly in terms of geometric data associated to the billiard map. This results in new formulas for the wave invariants. The order of the principal symbol, which appears to be inconsistent in the works of \cite{MaMe82} and \cite{Popov1994}, is also corrected. In those papers, the principal symbol was never explicitly computed and to our knowledge, this paper contains the first precise formulas for the principal symbol of the wave trace. The wave trace formulas we provide are localized near both simple lengths corresponding to nondegenerate periodic orbits and degenerate lengths associated to one parameter families of periodic orbits tangent to a single rational caustic. Existence of a Hadamard-Riesz type parametrix for the wave propagator appears to be new in the literature, with the exception of the author's prior work \cite{Vig18} in the special case of elliptical domains. It allows us to circumvent the symbol calculus in \cite{DuGu75} and \cite{HeZe12} when computing trace formulas, which are instead derived from our explicit parametrix and a rescaling argument via Hadamard's variational formula for the wave trace. These techniques also appear to be new in the literature.