Eigenfunction non-orthogonality factors and the shape of CPA-like dips in a single-channel reflection from lossy chaotic cavities

Abstract

Motivated by the phenomenon of coherent perfect absorption, we study the shape of the deepest dips in the frequency-dependent single-channel reflection of waves from a cavity with spatially uniform losses. We show that it is largely determined by non-orthogonality factors O nn of the eigenmodes associated with the non-selfadjoint effective Hamiltonian. For cavities supporting chaotic ray dynamics we then use random matrix theory to derive, fully non-perturbatively, the explicit distribution of the non-orthogonality factors for systems with both broken and preserved time reversal symmetry. The results imply that O nn are heavy-tail distributed. As a by-product, we derive an explicit non-perturbative expression for the resonance density in a single-channel chaotic systems in a much simpler form than available in the literature.