Quantum response of weakly chaotic systems

¹ Department of Physics, Ben-Gurion University - Beer-Sheva 84105, Israel
² Code 6362, Naval Research Lab - Washington, DC 20375, USA

^a dcohen@bgu.ac.il

Received: 19 June 2010
Accepted: 12 October 2010

Abstract

Chaotic systems, that have a small Lyapunov exponent, do not obey the common random matrix theory predictions within a wide “weak quantum chaos” regime. This leads to a novel prediction for the rate of heating for cold atoms in optical billiards with vibrating walls. The Hamiltonian matrix of the driven system does not look like one from a Gaussian ensemble, but rather it is very sparse. This sparsity can be characterized by parameters s and g_s that reflect the percentage of large elements, and their connectivity, respectively. For g_s we use a resistor network calculation that has direct relation to the semilinear response characteristics of the system.