This Small Grant for Exploratory Research aims to study chaos in electromagnetic systems. During this 1-year experimental research program, we seek to establish the important principles governing electromagnetic chaos via specific experiments on: 1) Wavefunctions of chaotic microwave cavities, such s the Sinai billiard and the stadium. In particular, detailed information regarding the spatial distribution of the wavefunctions will be obtained using novel experimental techniques. 2) Spectral statistic of resonant mode frequencies of chaotic and regular cavities. 3) Scattering properties of chaotic systems, such as the three disk. The work is expected to impact on telecommunications, since the concepts of chaos will be introduced to electromagnetic systems for the first time. The program will borrow from and impact upon fundamental ideas in quantum chaos, eg. scarred eigenstates, eigenvalue spacing distributions, etc. In addition, the results can be scaled to correspond to experiments on quantum mesoscopic systems.
