Analysis of symmetry breaking in quartz blocks using superstatistical random-matrix theory

We study the symmetry breaking of acoustic resonances measured by Ellegaard et al. (1996) {[}1] in quartz blocks. The observed resonance spectra show a gradual transition from a superposition of two uncoupled components, one for each symmetry realization, to a single component that is well represented by a Gaussian orthogonal ensemble (GOE) of random matrices. We discuss the applicability of superstatistical random-matrix theory to the final stages of the symmetry-breaking transition. A comparison is made between the formula from superstatistics and that from a previous work by Abd El-Hady et al. (2002) {[}7], which describes the same data by introducing a third GOE component. Our results suggest that the inverse chi-squared superstatistics could be used for studying the whole symmetry-breaking process. (C) 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.