West ’11, Kottos Published in Physical Review Letters

Carl West ’11, Tsampikos Kottos, assistant professor of physics, and Tomas Prosen of the University of Ljubljana in Slovenia, are the co-authors of an article titled “PT-Symmetric Wave Chaos,” published in Physical Review Letters 104 in 2010.

“This work studied the universal properties of this crossover and demonstrated that a simple scaling function could embody the effects of such dramatically different changes as increasing the system size, varying the initial energy, or having varying degrees of imperfections / disorder in the system,” West explains. “While these results were obtained from a toy model, they carry direct applications to optics where the balanced use of gain and loss has become a booming field over the past years, yet general questions of the effects of disorder or system size scaling were as of yet unknown.”