Boundary losses and spatial statistics of complex modes in a chaotic microwave cavity

submitted to PRLWe experimentally study the various manifestations of ohmic losses in a two-dimensional microwave chaotic cavity and exhibit two different contributions to the resonance widths. We show that the parts of these widths, which vary from mode to mode, are associated to ohmic losses located at the boundary of the cavity. We also describe how this non-proportional damping is responsible for the complex character of wavefunctions (corresponding to a spatially non-uniform phase), which is ubiquitous in open or dissipative wave systems. We experimentally demonstrate that the non-proportional widths are related to a single parameter, which measures the amount of complexity of wavefunctions, and provide theoretical arguments in favor of this relation