Making a billiard tattoo

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2024-10-04 09:30:05

I don’t write a blog, but this is something I wanted to put online, and this webpage is pretty much the only place I have. So, in this “blog post”, I will describe the process I went through to design the tattoo I have on my left sleeve:

The tattoo is inspired by a real physical system. The lines represent electrons inside a nanodevice, which are scattered from the dots, representing scattering centers in the device. This is a topic that I have been working a lot during my PhD [1, 2, 3], and the way I approached this electron system was through dynamical billiards:

A dynamical billiard is a system where a particle is propagating inside a domain, bouncing from obstacle to obstacle by a specular reflection at the boundary of the obstacles.

I have always found these plots artistically very pleasant. In addition, dynamical billiards are a truly fascinating class of systems. Not only they can model so many different aspects of reality (from electrons in a nanodevice, to lasers and even waves), but they are also conceptually simple. Even though everyone can understand billiards (I believe), they can still illustrate all aspects of chaos (meaning deterministic chaos of nonlinear dynamics). That is why after doing research on billiards, I have started using them as teaching tools in my lectures on nonlinear dynamics.