The Collision of a Deformable Particle with a Corner Formed by Two Perpendicular Walls

Squash is a highly competitive racquet sport. Professional players can answer most shots, regardless of how near the ball is to the wall. Only one shot is unanswerable. When the ball collides against the `nick’ formed by a vertical and a horizontal wall, under certain conditions, it rolls instead of bouncing, loosing most of its vertical momentum; hence, a reply is impossible. In this investigation, we study the conditions for this process to occur. We conducted visualizations with a high speed camera, throwing a squash ball to a corner to reproduce the nick shot in a controlled manner. Balls were thrown with a sling shot at different positions and angles in the vicinity of the corner. We determined the conditions for which a ball can loose all of its vertical bouncing motion. In this paper, we present some results, and a simple model to explain the phenomenon.