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\section*{Acknowledgements}

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During the period of my PhD studies I received the invaluable help and
support of numerous colleagues and friends without which this work
could not have been possible. I would like to thank all of
them. \emph{Gracias}.

It is a great pleasure to thank PD.~Gregor Hackenbroich for the
excellent guidance throughout the work. The open and continuous
discussion we held during the course of the last years in which I felt
my ideas were welcome and appreciated, and through which he exposed me
to new and interesting topics and provided me with the support and
encouragement to pursue research on them, led to fruitful work done
together from which I took great satisfaction. The help and example he
offered to me went beyond the academic and working environments and
permeated other spheres of my life, I am particularly thankful for
that.

I am grateful to Prof.~Fritz Haake for his involvement in and collaborations to this work. I profited immensely from his in-depth knowledge of both quantum optics and quantum chaos through several insightful scientific discussions at different stages of my work. Witnessing his cheerful approach to research, always managed to motivate me.

The good working environment that I found in the ``quantum chaos'' group in Essen was
without doubt the most positive and influential factor for the well
development of my research work. I am grateful to all of its
members. Dimitry V.\ Savin, by patiently answering to all of my
questions, made clear to me most of the concepts of scattering theory
that I needed for this thesis. I am in debt with him for the many
fruitful discussions on open systems from which I always ended up
taking much more than I put in. The work and comments of
Prof.~Hans-J.\ Sommers were crucial for my own understanding of the
projection formalism and for the application of random matrix theory
to open optical resonators presented in this work. On this last
subject, the comments of Prof.~Yan Fyodorov were also
important. Special thanks goes to Prof.~Petr A.\ Braun for the many
delightful and illustrative scientific (and non-scientific)
conversations. I would also like to say thanks to Holger Shaefers, Christopher Manderfeld, Dominique Spehner, Stefan Heusler, and Sebastian M\"uller for explaining me their work, sharing their ideas with me, and for many interesting discussions. I owe a large debt of gratitude to Ms. Monika Motzko for her generous help in dealing with every day administrative issues in and out of the university.

In the last years I have enjoyed the friendly atmosphere of the
theoretical physical department in Essen. In particular, I thank
Prof.~Joachim Krug, Walter Strunz, Jouni Kallunki and Philipp Kuhn for
enjoyable and interesting conversations.

I wish to express my deep gratitude to Prof.~Thomas Dittrich for his
constructive criticisms and wise counsels in scientific and
non-scientific matters. I thank Prof.~Uzy Smilansky for his interest
in my work and for his hospitality during my visit to his group at the
Weizmann Institute.

I am thankful to Juan Diego Urbina for his support, and for his
insightful comments and critics to my work. I enjoy very much the
exciting, and almost daily, exchanged of ideas of all sort that we
kept during this period. I wish to thank Javier Madro\~{n}ero for his
unconditional help and  interesting discussions.

I would like to say thank you to Annette Fiebig for her warm hospitality and valuable help since my first day in Essen. I am also thankful to Gabriela Baez and Rafael M\'{e}ndez for making it so easy for me to get settled in Essen. 

I want to express all my gratitude towards Esperanza, Fernando, and Federico for their unconditional support. Finally, I thank Olga for her priceless support, for keeping me close and letting me move along with her.

This work was supported by the SFB/TR 12 der Deutschen Forschungsgemeinschaft. 

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