Reflection in a strictly convex bounded planar billiard acts on the space of oriented lines and preserves a standard area form. A caustic is a curve C whose tangent lines are reflected by the billiard to lines tangent to C. The famous Birkhoff conjecture states that the only strictly convex billiards with a foliation by closed caustics near the boundary are ellipses. By Lazutkin’s theorem, there always exists a Cantor family of closed caustics approaching the boundary. In the present paper, we deal with an open billiard, whose boundary is a strictly convex embedded (non-closed) curve $\gamma $. We prove that there exists a domain U adjacent to $\gamma $ from the convex side and a $C^\infty $-smooth foliation of $U\cup \gamma $ whose leaves are $\gamma $ and (non-closed) caustics of the billiard. This generalizes a previous result by Melrose on the existence of a germ of foliation as above. We show that there exists a continuum of above foliations by caustics whose germs at each point in $\gamma $ are pairwise different. We prove a more general version of this statement for $\gamma $ being an (immersed) arc. It also applies to a billiard bounded by a closed strictly convex curve $\gamma $ and yields infinitely many ‘immersed’ foliations by immersed caustics. For the proof of the above results, we state and prove their analogue for a special class of area-preserving maps generalizing billiard reflections: the so-called $C^{\infty }$-lifted strongly billiard-like maps. We also prove a series of results on conjugacy of billiard maps near the boundary for open curves of the above type.

Let τ be the involution changing the sign of two coordinates in ℙ4. We prove that τ induces the identity action on the second Chow group of the intersection of a τ-invariant cubic with a τ-invariant quadric hypersurface in ℙ4. Let lτ and Πτ be the one- and two-dimensional components of the fixed locus of the involution τ. We describe the generalized Prymian associated with the projection of a τ-invariant cubic 𝓵 ⊂ P4 from lτ onto Πτ in terms of the Prymians 𝓅2 and 𝓅3 associated with the double covers of two irreducible components, of degree 2 and 3, respectively, of the reducible discriminant curve. This gives a precise description of the induced action of the involution τ on the continuous part of the Chow group CH2 (𝓵). The action on the subgroup corresponding to 𝓅3 is the identity, and the action on the subgroup corresponding to 𝓅2 is the multiplication by —1.