Mechanisms of chaos in billiards: dispersing, defocusing and nothing else

We explain and justify that the only mechanisms of chaotic dynamics for billiards are dispersing and defocusing. We also introduce boomerang billiards which dynamics demonstrate that two rather broadly accepted views about some features of nonlinear dynamics are actually wrong. Namely correlations in billiards having focusing components of the boundary can decay exponentially, and continuous time correlations for a billiard flow may decay faster than discrete time correlations for a billiard map. (invited article)