Chaotic Dynamics and Quantum Field Theory

Cuny Graduate School University Center, New York NY

Investigators

Abstract

This award funds the research activities of Professor Vladimir Rosenhaus at The Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Chaos, a ubiquitous phenomenon in nature, is the extreme sensitivity to small changes which gives rise to the violent churning inside of a smoke plume or behind a rock in a rapidly flowing river. The goal of this project is to better understand how chaos manifests itself at the smallest scales in nature, at the level of fundamental particles. A web of discoveries over the past decade, at the intersection of high energy physics, condensed matter physics, and quantum information theory, have revealed the essential role chaos must play in the eventual solution of one of the deepest problems in physics, of reconciling gravity with quantum mechanics. As a result, research in this area advances the national interest by promoting the progress of science in one of its most fundamental directions: the discovery and understanding of new physical laws. Professor Rosenhaus will search for signatures of chaos in theoretical computations of high energy particle scattering and will develop new models exhibiting many-body quantum chaos. This project is also envisioned to have significant broader impacts. Professor Rosenhaus will mentor graduate students and postdocs who will be involved in the research, develop new special topics graduate courses based on the research, give public lectures, and organize scientific workshops. More technically, Professor Rosenhaus will use chaos as a guide and a theme to better understand the dynamics of quantum field theories, and will study chaos in scattering in quantum field theory. The erratic behavior of many-particle scattering will provide the basis for a new measure of chaos in quantum field theory, which will shed light on nearly-integrable quantum field theories. In the context of string theory, he will compute novel scattering amplitudes of highly excited strings, giving a concrete demonstration of chaos in high energy scattering. In addition, building on the Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev model, new large N models exhibiting many-body quantum chaos will be found and used to gain insight on thermalization and chaos in strongly coupled quantum field theories. Through use of solvable models and conformal field theory techniques, novel examples of quantum turbulent cascades will be found. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.