Experimental investigation of the fluctuations in nonchaotic scattering in microwave billiards

TL;DR

This study experimentally explores how the spectral and scattering properties of microwave billiards transition from integrable to chaotic dynamics by adding scatterers, revealing universal fluctuation behaviors despite non-universal spectral statistics.

Contribution

It demonstrates that adding a single scatterer to a sector billiard induces a transition to universal fluctuation properties, bridging integrable and chaotic regimes.

Findings

Spectral properties are sensitive to classical dynamics.

Wavefunction component distributions are insensitive to classical dynamics.

Scattering matrix fluctuations match those of fully chaotic systems.

Abstract

We report on the experimental investigation of the properties of the eigenvalues and wavefunctions and the fluctuation properties of the scattering matrix of closed and open billiards, respectively, of which the classical dynamics undergoes a transition from integrable via almost integrable to fully chaotic. To realize such a system we chose a billiard with a 60 degree sector shape of which the classical dynamics is integrable, and introduced circular scatterers of varying number, size and position. The spectral properties of generic quantum systems of which the classical counterpart is either integrable or chaotic are universal and well understood. If, however, the classical dynamics is pseudo-integrable or almost-integrable, they exhibit a non-universal intermediate statistics, for which analytical results are known only in a few cases, like, e.g., if it corresponds to semi-Poisson statistics. Since the latter is, above all, clearly distinguishable from those of integrable and chaotic systems our aim was to design a billiard with these features which indeed is achievable by adding just one scatterer of appropriate size and position to the sector billiard. We demonstrate that, while the spectral properties of almost-integrable billiards are sensitive to the classical dynamics, this is not the case for the distribution of the wavefunction components, which was analysed in terms of the strength distribution, and the fluctuation properties of the scattering matrix which coincide with those of typical, fully chaotic systems.