Experimental study of generic billiards with microwave resonators

Abstract

In this work we study the eigenstates and the energy spectra of a generic billiard system with the use of microwave resonators. This is possible due to the exact correspondence between the Schroedinger equation and the electric field equations of the lowest modes in thin microwave resonators. We obtain a good agreement between the numerical (exact) and experimental eigenstates, while the short range experimental spectral statistics show the expected Brody-like behaviour in this energy range, as opposed to the Berry-Robnik picture which is valid only in the semiclassical region of sufficiently small effective Planck's constant.

13 pages, 10 figures (in .GIF format), high quality pictures available upon request, PTP LaTeX style, to be published in the proceedings of the conference/summer school 'Let's Face Chaos through Nonlinear Dynamics', Maribor, Slovenia, June/July 1999, eds. M. Robnik et al., Prog. Theor. Phys. Suppl. (Kyoto) 139 (2000)