Calendar

SUPA/IOPS/Carnegie Lecture

Professor Achim Richter

Institute of Nuclear Physics at the Darmstadt University of Technology, Germany.

Playing Billiards with Microwaves – Quantum Manifestations of Classical Chaos

University of the West of Scotland (Paisley Campus)

Friday  May 9  2008 at 17.00h in Lecture Theatre P118 (Refreshments from 16.30h)

Sufficiently flat microwave resonators shaped in the form of billiards are particularly well suited to study the quantum mechanical behaviour of classically chaotic systems because of the formal equivalence of the respective wave equations, i.e. the Helmholtz and the Schroedinger equation. With superconducting resonators characterized by high quality factors it has become possible for the first time to measure the spectrum of eigenmodes and their eigenfunctions completely and to determine their statistical properties. Two-dimensional billiards systems (stadium, mushroom, …) of different chaoticity are discussed and it is shown that they display universal features which are also evident in real mesoscopic systems of different scales, i.e. hadrons, nuclei, atoms, molecules, clusters. Special emphasis is placed on properties of measured spectra and wavefunctions, and on so called Friedel oscillations, known also from surface and condensed matter physics. Finally, chaotic scattering in microwave billiards is considered for time reversal invariant and non-invariant systems, respectively.

Biography:  Professor Dr. Dr. h.c. mult. Achim Richter
Professor Achim Richter is an eminent physicist who has made internationally-leading contributions to his field. Since 1974 he has been Professor of Physics and Director of the Institute of Nuclear Physics at the Darmstadt University of Technology in Germany. Professor Richter’s research interests include Nuclear Reactions with Heavy Ions, Symmetries and Invariance Principles, Atomic Physics, Nuclear Structure and Electromagnetic Interactions in Nuclei, Accelerator Physics, Nuclear Astrophysics and Nonlinear Dynamics and Chaos. Recent awards and honours include an Honorary Doctorate of the Kharkiv National University, Ukraine, the Stern-Gerlach Medal of the German Physical Society, Foreign Member of the Royal Society of Arts and Sciences in Göteborg, Sweden, Tage Erlander Professorship of the Swedish Research Council, and Order of Merit of the State of Hesse.

Professor Richter is the first senior editor of the APS journal, Reviews of Modern Physics, not to be based in the United States. From November 1, 2008, Prof. Richter will serve as a Director of the European Centre for Theoretical Studies in Nuclear Physics and Related Areas, ECT* in Trento, Italy.

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