Experimental Examination of the Effect of Short Ray Trajectories in Two-port Wave-Chaotic Scattering Systems

TL;DR

This paper experimentally investigates how short ray trajectories influence the statistical behavior of wave-chaotic scattering systems, demonstrating that accounting for these trajectories improves the prediction of system impedance.

Contribution

It introduces an experimental analysis of short ray trajectories' effects on wave-chaotic systems and shows how their averaged impedance can enhance statistical predictions.

Findings

Short ray trajectories significantly affect scattering statistics.

Averaged impedance based on trajectories improves modeling accuracy.

Experimental validation on microwave billiards confirms theoretical insights.

Abstract

Predicting the statistics of realistic wave-chaotic scattering systems requires, in addition to random matrix theory, introduction of system-specific information. This paper investigates experimentally one aspect of system-specific behavior, namely the effects of short ray trajectories in wave-chaotic systems open to outside scattering channels. In particular, we consider ray trajectories of limited length that enter a scattering region through a channel (port) and subsequently exit through a channel (port). We show that a suitably averaged value of the impedance can be computed from these trajectories and that this can improve the ability to describe the statistical properties of the scattering systems. We illustrate and test these points through experiments on a realistic two-port microwave scattering billiard.