A remark on the number of invisible directions for a smooth Riemannian metric

Abstract

In this note we give a construction of a smooth Riemannian metric on R^n which is standard Euclidean outside a compact set K and such that it has N = n(n + 1)=2 invisible directions, meaning that all geodesics lines passing through the set K in these directions remain the same straight lines on exit. For example in the plane our construction gives three invisible directions. This is in contrast with billiard type obstacles where a very sophisticated example due to A.Plakhov and V.Roshchina gives 2 invisible directions in the plane and 3 in the space. We use reflection group of the root system An in order to make the directions of the roots invisible.