Microwave experiments using open chaotic cavities in the realm of the effective Hamiltonian formalism

The description of open quantum system successfully uses the concept of the effective Hamiltonian, which takes into account the coupling to the environment. The concept can be extended to classical waves. Experimentally, classical waves are very convenient as they allow to control boundaries, coupling and absorption. We combine here recent works with microwaves investigating properties of open systems which can be described by an effective Hamiltonian. This ranges from spectral properties like modifications to level dynamics, width distribution and coupling fidelity to spatial properties like intensity distributions and complexness parameter which describes the non-orthogonality of eigenfunctions. (C) 2013 WILEY-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim