Vibrating soap films: An analog for quantum chaos on billiards

Abstract

We present an experimental setup based on the normal modes of vibrating soap films which shows quantum features of integrable and chaotic billiards. In particular, we obtain the so-called scars-narrow linear regions with high probability along classical periodic orbits-for the classically chaotic billiards. We show that these scars are also visible at low frequencies. Finally, we suggest some applications of our experimental setup in other related two-dimensional wave phenomena. (C) 1998 American Association of Physics Teachers.