Microwave experiments in open billiards

A decade after the first application of microwave techniques to the study of chaotic billiards [1] microwave experiments have become a standard tool in quantum chaos research [2]. In the present contribution a number of recent results in open systems will be presented. According to the Landauer formula the conductance through a quantum dot is proportional to the total transmission. Since this quantity is directly available from a microwave experiment, such an approach is ideally suited to check theoretical predictions on transmission distributions. For chaotic cavities there are clear-cut predictions from random-matrix theory on the channel number dependence of the transmission distribution [3]. Systems with and without time-reversal symmetry should be easily discernible as well. In the experiment time-reversal symmetry can be broken by introducing ferrites into the system. Thus detailed tests of theory become possible, which would have been hardly accessible by any other method.

[1] H.-J. Stöckmann and J. Stein, Phys. Rev. Lett. 64, 2215 (1990).
[2] H.-J. Stöckmann, Quantum Chaos - An Introduction (University Press, Cambridge, 1999).
[3] C. Beenakker, Rev. Mod. Phys. 69, 731 (1997).