Relaxation fluctuations about an equilibrium in quantum chaos

Abstract

Classically chaotic systems relax to coarse grained states of equilibrium. Here we numerically study the quantization of such bounded relaxing systems, in particular the quasi-periodic fluctuations associated with the correlation between two density operators. We find that when the operators, or their Wigner-Weyl transforms, have obvious classical limits that can be interpreted as piecewise continuous functions on phase space, the variance of the fluctuations can distinguish classically chaotic and regular motions, thus providing a novel diagnostic devise of quantum chaos. We uncover several features of the relaxation fluctuations that are shared by disparate systems thus establishing restricted universality. If we consider the nonlinearity driving the chaos as pseudo-time, we find that the onset of classical chaos is indicated quantally as the relaxation of the relaxation fluctuations to a Gaussian distribution.