The Role of Diffraction in the Quantization of Dispersing Billiards

We study diffraction corrections to the semiclassical spectral density of dispersing (Sinai) billiards. They modify the contributions of periodic orbits (PO's), with at least one segment which is almost tangent to the concave part of the boundary. Given a wavenumber $k$, all the PO's with length up to the Heisenberg length $O(k)$ are required for quantization. We show that most of the contributions of PO's which are longer than a limit $O(k^{2/3})$ must be corrected for diffraction effects. For orbits which just miss tangency, the corrections are of the same magnitude as the semiclassical contributions themselves. Orbits which bounce at extreme forward angles give very small terms in the standard semiclassical theory. The diffraction corrections increase their amplitude substantially.