Statistical properties of highly excited quantum eigenstates of a strongly chaotic system (Q2366486)

The authors study the quantum mechanics of a conservative Hamiltonian system whose classical counterpart consists of a point particle sliding freely on a closed surface of constant negative curvature. When the eigenstates are expanded in a circular-wave basis, the expansion coefficients behave as Gaussian pseudo-random numbers. The authors suggest that this property is responsible for the wavefunction behaving as a Gaussian random function in the semi-classical limit. Further, the authors calculate the auto-correlation and path-correlation functions and compare them with a rough semi-classical Bessel function approximation. Agreement between the two is satisfactory only if a local averaging is performed over roughly 1000 de Broglie wavelengths. At lower values of the wavelength, the eigenstates show much more structure than predicted by the first semi-classical approximation. The paper contains some pretty colourful pictures which are really maps of the intensity (the squares of the absolute values of the wavefunctions) for various eigenstates.