Theoretical Studies of Quantum Chaos

Northeastern University, Boston MA

Investigators

Abstract

0070977 Jose The goal of this research program is to unravel specific hallmarks of quantum phenomena of model systems that are chaotic or have unpredictable behavior in the classical limit. Progress has been made in understanding this problem, mostly for single particle systems. We propose to consider the many-body billiard problem in terms of an interacting gas of electrons subjected to time-periodic magnetic fields. Our initial results indicate that for a noninteracting electron gas the Pauli exclusion ``force" significantly modifies its magnetic properties depending if the dynamics is integrable or chaotic. We will next make this problem more realistic and include the Coulomb interactions, both classically and quantum mechanically. We will also study billiards with broken rotational invariance that have ``fractional'' angular momentum with or without constant external magnetic fields. The PI also proposes to study single particle chaotic scattering in time-dependent multiple potential billiards. We will also explore the connections between friction and chaos, in the context of simple time-dependent classical and quantum models. This is an important problem since it addresses the basic physical and conceptual question of energy dissipation, classical chaos, and decoherence, of importance in the field of quantum computation.