The present doctoral thesis is concerned with the investigation of the quantum states of billiards with the shape of a mushroom and the scattering properties of open classical and quantum mechanical billiard systems. For this, based on the analogy between quantum billiards and flat electromagnetic cavities, experiments with microwave resonators have been performed. Mushroom billiards are systems with a mixed classical dynamics and the particular property, that their classical phase space is clearly divided into a regular and a chaotic part. Accordingly, they provide an ideal system for the study of the interaction between regularity and chaos. In the present work, for the first time, the properties of quantum mushroom billiards were investigated. For this, resonance spectra were measured with superconducting resonators and their eigenfunctions were obtained from measurements of the electric field intensities at room temperature. The eigenvalue spectra were investigated with statistical methods. Two main results were acquired: First, it became apparent, that there are two dominant and short periodic orbits in a classical mushroom billiard which cause a supershell structure in the level density of the corresponding quantum billiard. The influence of these orbits becomes manifest even in the nearest neighbor spacing distribution of adjacent eigenvalues. This result is remarkable, as typically only long range correlations are influenced by short periodic orbits. Second, in all investigated quantities signatures of the classically forbidden dynamical tunneling were observed. Mushroom billiards seem to provide an ideal system for the study of this complex effect, which is present in all systems with mixed dynamics and currently is of large interest in the quantum chaos community. Despite the interaction through quantum dynamical tunneling, essentially all eigenvalues could be attributed to either regular or chaotic states. This can be ascribed to the clear separation of the classical phase space into a regular and a chaotic part. This separability is also observed in the measured intensity distributions. By superimposing the distributions related with chaotic states the mean probability for a quantum particle to stay inside the billiard was evaluated. Up to quantum effects of the order of the typical wave length its behavior is close to that of its classical analog. Moreover, classical mushroom billiards with a hole in their boundary were investigated numerically. Such billiards constitute a scattering system. In the open billiards considered here a particle entering the billiard performs regular motion for a certain time before it finally escapes. However, the staying time cannot take any arbitrary value. In fact, the first allowed values show a systematics which reminds on a Fibonacci series. It could be understood with help of an analysis of the possible particle orbits. The results seem to be relevant for nano structures. Even without an opening in its side walls, a microwave billiard is an open scattering system, where microwave power is transported through the resonator via antennas. This scattering process is comparable with that of a compound nucleus reaction, where a target nucleus is bombarded by a particle, thereby forming a compound nucleus, which eventually decays. The open reaction channels correspond to the antennas and the ohmic resistance in the walls of the resonator. For a statistical description in the framework of random matrix theory the same scattering matrix ansatz is used for both scattering processes. While in nuclear physics only cross sections, that is the absolute value of the scattering matrix is measurable, in microwave experiments the full scattering matrix is accessible. As a consequence, theoretical predictions by Verbaarschot, Weidenmüller and Zirnbauer (VWZ) for the autocorrelation functions of the scattering matrix elements can be tested with large data sets. Here, the transition region between isolated resonances and the regime of Ericson fluctuations, where resonances strongly overlap, is of particular interest. In the framework of the present doctoral thesis, the scattering matrix elements of a chaotic billiard were measured. It could be shown, that the VWZ model provides a good description for the experimental data. The theoretical prediction was fitted to the Fourier coefficients of the measured spectra, as their errors are uncorrelated. A guideline for a statistically well-founded test procedure for the description of the predictions by VWZ could be developed. | English |