The Bakerian Lecture, 1987. Quantum chaology

Abstract

Bounded or driven classical systems often exhibit chaos (exponential instability that persists), but their quantum counterparts do not. Nevertheless, there are new regimes of quantum behaviour that emerge in the semiclassical limit and depend on whether the classical orbits are regular or chaotic, and this motivates the following definition. Definition. Quantum chaology is the study of semiclassical, but non-classical, behaviour characteristic of systems whose classical motion exhibits chaos. This is illustrated by the statistics of energy levels. On scales comparable with the mean level spacing (of order h$^N$ for N freedoms), these fall into universality classes: for classically chaotic systems, the statistics are those of random matrices (real symmetric or complex hermitian, depending on the presence or absence of time-reversal symmetry); for classically regular ones, the statistics are Poisson. On larger scales (of order h, i.e. classically small but semiclassically large), universality breaks down. These phenomena are being explained by representing spectra in terms of classical closed orbits: universal spectral behaviour has its origin in very long orbits; non-universal behaviour depends only on short ones.