Experimental test of spontaneous correlation and anomalous sensitivity in finite highly excited many-body systems

Abstract

We have tested recent suggestion of anomalous sensitivity in highly excited quantum many-body systems. Two independent measurements of cross sections for the 19F+93Nb strongly dissipative heavy-ion collisions have been performed at incident energies from 102 to 108 MeV in steps of 250 keV.In the two measurements we used different, independently prepared, 93Nb target foils with nominally the same thickness.The data indicate statistically significant non-reproducibility of the energy oscillating yields in the two measurements. The observed non-reproducibility is consistent with recent theoretical arguments on spontaneous correlation, slow phase randomization and chaos in highly excited complex quantum systems.