First Experimental Observation of Superscars in a Pseudointegrable Barrier Billiard

E. Bogomolny ¹, B. Dietz ², T. Friedrich ², M. Miski-Oglu ², A. Richter ², F. Schaefer ², C. Schmit ¹

Physical Review Letters 97 (2006) 254102

With a perturbation body technique intensity distributions of the electric field strength in a flat microwave billiard with a barrier inside up to mode numbers as large as about 700 were measured. A method for the reconstruction of the amplitudes and phases of the electric field strength from those intensity distributions has been developed. Recently predicted superscars have been identified experimentally and – using the well known analogy between the electric field strength and the quantum mechanical wave function in a two-dimensional microwave billiard – their properties determined.

• 1. Laboratoire de Physique Théorique et Modèles Statistiques (LPTMS),
  CNRS : UMR8626 – Université Paris XI – Paris Sud
• 2. Institut für Kernphysik,
  Technische Universität Darmstadt