A difference-equation formalism for the nodal domains of separable billiards

Abstract

Recently, the nodal domain counts of planar, integrable billiards with Dirichlet boundary conditions were shown to satisfy certain difference equations in [Ann. Phys. 351, 1-12 (2014)]. The exact solutions of these equations give the number of domains explicitly. For complete generality, we demonstrate this novel formulation for three additional separable systems and thus extend the statement to all integrable billiards.