Many-body quantum chaos: Recent developments and applications to nuclei

In the last decade, there has been an increasing interest in the analysis of energy level spectra and wave functions of nuclei, particles, atoms and other quantum many-body systems by means of statistical methods and random matrix ensembles. The concept of quantum chaos plays a central role for understanding the universal properties of the energy spectrum of quantum systems. Since these properties concern the whole spectrum, statistical methods become an essential tool. Besides random matrix theory, new theoretical developments making use of information theory, time series analysis, and the merging of thermodynamics and the semiclassical approximation are emphasized. Applications of these methods to quantum systems, especially to atomic nuclei, are reviewed. We focus on recent developments like the study of “imperfect spectra” to estimate the degree of symmetry breaking or the fraction of missing levels, the existence of chaos remnants in nuclear masses, the onset of chaos in nuclei, and advances in the comprehension of the Hamiltonian structure in many-body systems. Finally, some applications of statistical spectroscopy methods generated by many-body chaos and two-body random matrix ensembles are described, with emphasis on Gamow–Teller strength sums and beta decay rates for stellar evolution and supernovae.