Superuniversal Statistics of Complex Time-Delays in Non-Hermitian Scattering Systems

The Wigner-Smith time-delay of flux conserving systems is a real quantity that measures how long an excitation resides in an interaction region. The complex generalization of time-delay to non-Hermitian systems is still under development, and its statistical properties in the short-wavelength limit of complex chaotic scattering systems have not been investigated. From the experimentally measured multi-port scattering (S)-matrices of one-dimensional graphs, a two-dimensional billiard, and a three-dimensional cavity, we calculate the complex Wigner-Smith, as well as each individual reflection and transmission time-delays. The complex reflection time-delay differences between each port are calculated, and the transmission time-delay differences are introduced for systems exhibiting non-reciprocal scattering. Large time-delays are associated with scattering singularities such as coherent perfect absorption, reflectionless scattering, slow light, and uni-directional invisibility. We demonstrate that the large-delay tails of the distributions of the real and imaginary parts of each time-delay quantity are superuniversal, independent of experimental parameters: wave propagation dimension mathcal{D}, number of scattering channels M, Dyson symmetry class β, and uniform attenuation η. The tails determine the abundance of the singularities in generic scattering systems, and the superuniversality is in direct contrast with the well-established statistics of unitary systems, where the distribution tail depends explicitly on the values of M and β. We relate the statistics to the topological properties of the corresponding singularities. Although the results presented here are based on classical microwave experiments, they are applicable to any non-Hermitian wave-chaotic scattering system in the short-wavelength limit, such as optical or acoustic resonators.