3D Billiards problem inside a torus

These so-called "whispering gallery modes" are familiar from studies of microcavity lasers; they can trap the light indefinitely, only limited by diffraction; this web site by Jens Nöckel nicely summarizes the issues; an efficient way to untrap the trajectory is to introduce flattened portions in the boundary (in 2D this would be a stadium rather than a circle, in 3D it could be an ellipsoidal shape). A research article on these issues, with many pointers to the literature, is Chaotic light: a theory of asymmetric resonant cavities.


As to the fact that this improbable scenario arose from chaos, it seems that numerical error really was at fault (my bisection code was faulty).

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This behavior is more to be expected.

EDIT: According to the literature, as Carlo Beenakker pointed out, such "whispering gallery modes" wherein trajectories can stay arbitrarily close to the surface can only exist if they trace out a curve with strictly concave curvature everywhere -- a condition often violated in a torus. This, together with $C^6$ regularity, are a sufficient condition for the existence of such caustics. Quite an improvement over the previous result by Lazutkin demanding $C^{553}$ regularity.

Source: https://mat-web.upc.edu/people/rafael.ramirez/res/pdf/oberwolfach10.pdf