The behaviour of resonances in Hecke triangular billiards under deformation

The right-hand boundary of Artin's billiard on the Poincare half-plane is continuously deformed to generate a class of chaotic billiards which includes fundamental domains of the Hecke groups Gamma(2, n) at certain values of the deformation parameter. The quantum scattering problem in these open chaotic billiards is described and the distributions of both real and imaginary parts of the resonant eigenvalues are investigated. The transitions to arithmetic chaos in the cases n epsilon {4, 6} are closely examined and the explicit analytic form for the scattering matrix is given together with the Fourier coefficients for the scattered wavefunction. The n = 4 and 6 cases have an additional set of regular equally spaced resonances compared to Artin's billiard ( n = 3). For a general deformation, a numerical procedure is presented which generates the resonance eigenvalues and the evolution of the eigenvalues is followed as the boundary is varied continuously which leads to dramatic changes in their distribution. For deformations away from the non-generic arithmetic cases, including that of the tiling Hecke triangular billiard n = 5, the distributions of the positions and widths of the resonances are consistent with the predictions of a random matrix theory.