Elliptic islands and zero measure escaping orbits in a class of outer billiards

Abstract

We study outer billiard systems around a class of circular sectors. For semi-discs, we prove the existence of elliptic islands occupying a positive proportion of the plane. Combined with known results, this shows the coexistence of stability and diffusion for this system. On the other hand, we show that there exists a countable family of circular sectors for which the outer billiard system has zero measure of escaping orbits.