Are Scattering Properties of Graphs Uniquely Connected to Their Shapes?

The famous question of Mark Kac "Can one hear the shape of a drum?" addressing the unique connection between the shape of a planar region and the spectrum of the corresponding Laplace operator can be legitimately extended to scattering systems. In the modified version one asks whether the geometry of a vibrating system can be determined by scattering experiments. We present the first experimental approach to this problem in the case of microwave graphs (networks) simulating quantum graphs. Our experimental results strongly indicate a negative answer. To demonstrate this we consider scattering from a pair of isospectral microwave networks consisting of vertices connected by microwave coaxial cables and extended to scattering systems by connecting leads to infinity to form isoscattering networks. We show that the amplitudes and phases of the determinants of the scattering matrices of such networks are the same within the experimental uncertainties. Furthermore, we demonstrate that the scattering matrices of the networks are conjugated by the, so called, transplantation relation.Comment: 3 figures; Physical Review Letters, 201

Distributions of the Wigner reaction matrix for microwave networks with symplectic symmetry in the presence of absorption

We report on experimental studies of the distribution of the reflection coefficients, and the imaginary and real parts of Wigner's reaction (K) matrix employing open microwave networks with symplectic symmetry and varying size of absorption. The results are compared to analytical predictions derived for the single-channel scattering case within the framework of random matrix theory (RMT). Furthermore, we performed Monte Carlo simulations based on the Heidelberg approach for the scattering (S) and K matrix of open quantum-chaotic systems and the two-point correlation function of the S-matrix elements. The analytical results and the Monte Carlo simulations depend on the size of absorption. To verify them, we performed experiments with microwave networks for various absorption strengths. We show that deviations from RMT predictions observed in the spectral properties of the corresponding closed quantum graph, and attributed to the presence of nonuniversal short periodic orbits, does not have any visible effects on the distributions of the reflection coefficients and the K and S matrices associated with the corresponding open quantum graph