Robert N. Oerter
SFA, Inc., c/o Naval Res. Lab., Code 7131, Washington, DC 20375-5350
Ed Ott
Thomas M. Antonsen
Paul So
Univ. of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742
A finite reverberant system having a discontinuity in some physical parameter will exhibit the splitting of ray trajectories in the high-frequency limit. It is known that this ray splitting can increase the amount of chaos in the ray trajectories [Couchman et al., Phys. Rev. A 46, 6193 (1992)]. This increase of chaos is expected to reveal itself in the eigenfrequency spectrum as a shift away from Poisson statistics and toward the Gaussian orthogonal ensemble (GOE) statistics of random matrix theory. Numerical results are presented that confirm the predicted shift in the spectral statistics. [Work supported by ONR and DOE.]