Thursday, April 21, 2016, 16:00
WHGA Auditorium
Alexander Altland, Cologne University
Abstract:
'Quantum chaos' is a field exploring the physics of complex quantum
systems showing dynamical chaos in the classical limit. One of its
salient features is an extremely high level of physical universality: in
the presence of hard classical chaos quantum systems of very different
background -- heavy nuclei, solid state systems, complex molecules or
atoms, etc. -- all show identical behavior on the quantum level and at
low excitation energies. While this universality phenomenon has been a
subject of intensive research for decades, only rather recently have we
come to understand its physical principles. In this talk, we will review
these developments in ways that do not require previous knowledge of the
field. Specifically, we will discuss connections between the classical
phase space dynamics of chaotic systems and the statistics of quantum
spectra, and why concepts of particle physics and quantum field theory
have been instrumental to understanding these links.