Investigation of nodal domains in the chaotic microwave ray-splitting rough billiard

Abstract

We study experimentally nodal domains of wave functions (electric field distributions) lying in the regime of Shnirelman ergodicity in the chaotic microwave half-circular ray-splitting rough billiard. For this aim the wave functions of the billiard were measured up to the level number . We show that in the regime of Shnirelman ergodicity wave functions of the chaotic half-circular microwave ray-splitting rough billiard are extended over the whole energy surface and the amplitude distributions are Gaussian. For such ergodic wave functions, the dependence of the number of nodal domains on the level number was found. We show that in the limit the least squares fit of the experimental data yields , which is close to the theoretical prediction . We demonstrate that for higher level numbers the variance of the mean number of nodal domains is scattered around the theoretical limit . We also found that the distribution of the areas of nodal domains has power behavior , where the scaling exponent is equal to . This result is in good agreement with the prediction of percolation theory.