Non-colliding billiards in the plane

Abstract: We present an open problem about non-colliding freely moving hard disks in the Euclidean plane, together with related positive and negative partial results. The positive deterministic result gives a bounded, injective, non-colliding velocity assignment for the integer lattice. The negative result shows that no bounded continuous vector field on the whole plane can serve as a universal assignment satisfying the same separation inequality for all pairs of points at distance greater than one.