Our Research Group

Our research group is headed by Professor Steven Tomsovic. Our group has consisted of visiting researchers and post-doctoral, graduate and undergraduate students in physics and mathematics. We are part of the Department of Physics and reside on the 9th floor of the Webster Physical Science building on the campus of Washington State University in Pullman, Washington in the USA.

For the 2006-2007 school year, Professor Steven Tomsovic received the Martin-Gutzwiller Fellowship to attend the Max-Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems in Dresden, Germany. For more information, see this article.

Quantum Chaos

Quantum chaos is an interdisciplinary branch of physics which arose in the second half of the 20th century from the modelling of quantum/wave phenomenon with classical models which exhibited chaos. The transition regime between classical and quantum behavior is the semiclassical regime. The correspondence between the classical system and the quantum/wave system improves in the classical limit of large quantum numbers.

Important ideas associated with quantum chaos are level repulsion in the spectrum, dynamic localization in the time evolution and enhanced stationary wave intensities in regions of space where classical dynamics exhibits only unstable trajectories (wave function scarring). Important methods applied in the theoretical study of quantum chaos include random-matrix theory (with significant contributions from Oriol Bohigas) and periodic-orbit theory (pioneered by Martin Gutzwiller). Sir Michael Berry proposed an alternative name for quantum chaos as quantum chaology.