Billiard tables with analytic Birkhoff normal form are generically Gevrey divergent

Abstract

The problem of the existence of an analytic normal form near an equilibrium point of an area-preserving map and analyticity of the associated coordinate change is a classical problem in dynamical systems going back to Poincaré and Siegel. One important class of examples of area-preserving maps consists of the collision maps for planar billiards. Recently, Treschev discovered a formal $\mathbb{Z}_2 \times \mathbb{Z}_2$ symmetric billiard with locally linearizable dynamics and conjectured its convergence. Since then, a Gevrey regularity for such a billiard was proven by Wang and Zhang, but the original problem about analyticity still remains open. We extend the class of billiards by relaxing the symmetry condition and allowing conjugacies to non-linear analytic integrable normal forms. To keep the formal solution unique, odd table derivatives and the normal form are treated as parameters of the problem. We show that for the new problem, the series of the billiard table diverge for general parameters by proving the optimality of Gevrey bounds. The general parameter set is prevalent (in a certain sense has full measure) and it contains an open set. Instead of considering the problem in a functional sense and iterating approximation procedures, we employ formal power series methods and one-by-one directly reconstruct all the Taylor coefficients of the table. In order to prove that on an open set Taylor series diverges we define a Taylor recurrence operator and prove that it has a cone property. All solutions in that cone are only Gevrey regular and not analytic.