Temporal flooding of regular islands by chaotic wave packets

Abstract

We investigate the time evolution of wave packets in systems with a mixed phase space where regular islands and chaotic motion coexist. For wave packets started in the chaotic sea on average the weight on a quantized torus of the regular island increases due to dynamical tunneling. This flooding weight initially increases linearly and saturates to a value which varies from torus to torus. We demonstrate for the asymptotic flooding weight universal scaling with an effective tunneling coupling for quantum maps and the mushroom billiard. This universality is reproduced by a suitable random matrix model.