Wave chaos in the elastic disk.

The relation between the elastic wave equation for plane, isotropic bodies and an underlying classical ray dynamics is investigated. We study, in particular, the eigenfrequencies of an elastic disk with free boundaries and their connection to periodic rays inside the circular domain. Even though the problem is separable, wave mixing between the shear and pressure component of the wave field at the boundary leads to an effective stochastic part in the ray dynamics. This introduces phenomena typically associated with classical chaos as, for example, an exponential increase in the number of periodic orbits. Classically, the problem can be decomposed into an integrable part and a simple binary Markov process. Similarly, the wave equation can, in the high-frequency limit, be mapped onto a quantum graph. Implications of this result for the level statistics are discussed. Furthermore, a periodic trace formula is derived from the scattering matrix based on the inside-outside duality between eigenmodes and scattering solutions and periodic orbits are identified by Fourier transforming the spectral density.