Selected topics on "quantum chaos"

Andrew N. Jordan

Sanjay Hortikar

Steven Tomsovic

Through semiclassical methods the subject of quantum chaos motivates and depends on Hamiltonian chaos research. Presented here is a selection of some of the most important Hamiltonian chaos topics that in this way get directly related to any of a variety of quantum chaos research problems. The overall emphasis is on intuitive explanations and illustrations of various ideas with the references containing more mathematically rigorous expositions. The chapter begins with a description of various useful theoretical and computational tools of chaos research, e.g.~surfaces of section, paradigms of chaos, stability analysis, and symbolic dynamics... This is followed by discussions regarding the geometry of chaos, how chaotic systems respond to perturbations, and the complexification of Hamiltonian dynamics. Most of the contents concern topics that are long established and well known by now. The exceptions involve complications that arise from the complexification of phase space variables and time. There are relatively recent results summarized regarding the appropriate branches of determinant phases and how to distinguish complex trajectories that are associated with classically allowed processes versus those associated with non-allowed ones.

R. E. Prange

Liang Huang, Ying‐Cheng Lai

Abstract Quantum Chaos has been investigated for about a half century. It is an old yet vigorous interdisciplinary field with new concepts and interesting topics emerging constantly. Recent years have witnessed a growing interest in quantum chaos in relativistic quantum systems, leading to the still developing field of relativistic quantum chaos . The purpose of this paper is not to provide a thorough review of this area, but rather to outline the basics and introduce the key concepts and methods in a concise way. A few representative topics are discussed, which may help the readers to quickly grasp the essentials of relativistic quantum chaos. A brief overview of the general topics in quantum chaos has also been provided with rich references.

Giulio Casati, Boris Chirikov

The present collection of papers is devoted to a rather new and very controversial topic, the so-called “quantum chaos”. Some researchers see nothing essentially new at all in this phenomenon (apart from a number of various examples and models), and they have good reason to believe so. Indeed, the problems in this field all belong to the traditional, “old-fashion”, and rather “simple” quantum mechanics of finite-dimensional systems with a given interaction and no quantized fields. Nevertheless, many, including ourselves, consider quantum chaos to be a new discovery, though in an old field, of a great importance for fundamental physics. To understand this, the phenomenon of quantum chaos should be put into its proper perspective in recent developments in physics. The central point of this perspective is the conception of dynamical chaos (also a rather new topic) in classical mechanics (for a good review see, e.g., Refs.[l-3]). Thus before discussing the current understanding of quantum chaos we need briefly to describe classical dynamical chaos