Exponential instability for a class of dispersing billiards

The billiard in the exterior of a finite disjoint union $K$ of strictly convex bodies in ${\mathbb R}^d$ with smooth boundaries is considered. The existence of global constants $0 < \delta < 1$ and $C > 0$ is established such that if two billiard trajectories have $n$ successive reflections from the same convex components of $K$, then the distance between their $j$th reflection points is less than $C(\delta^j + \delta^{n-j})$ for a sequence of integers $j$ with uniform density in $\{1,2,\dots,n\}$. Consequently, the billiard ball map (although not continuous in general) is expansive. As applications, an asymptotic of the number of prime closed billiard trajectories is proved which generalizes a result of Morita [Mor], and it is shown that the topological entropy of the billiard flow does not exceed $\log (s-1)/a$, where $s$ is the number of convex components of $K$ and $a$ is the minimal distance between different convex components of $K$.