The length spectrum of periodic orbits in integrable hamiltonian systems can be expressed in terms of the set of winding numbers {M₁,…,M_f} on thef-tori. Using the Poisson summation formula, one can thus express the density, Σδ(T−T_M), as a sum of a smooth average part and fluctuations about it. Working with homogeneous separable potentials, we explicitly show that the fluctuations are due to quantal energies. Further, their statistical properties are universal and typical of a Poisson process as in the corresponding quantal energy eigenvalues. It is interesting to note however that even though long periodic orbits in chaotic billiards have similar statistical properties, the form of the fluctuations are indeed very different.

We review some properties of periodic orbit families in polygonal billiards and discuss in particular a sum rule that they obey. In addition, we provide algorithms to determine periodic orbit families and present numerical results that shed new light on the proliferation law and its variation with the genus of the invariant surface. Finally, we deal with correlations in the length spectrum and find that long orbits display Poisson fluctuations.

The classical phase space density projected on to the configuration space offers a means of comparing classical and quantum evolution. In this alternate approach that we adopt here, we show that for billiards, the eigenfunctions of the coarse-grained projected classical evolution operator are identical to a first approximation to the quantum Neumann eigenfunctions. Moreover, there exists a correspondence between the respective eigenvalues although their time evolutions differ.