Abstract

The detailed study of generic quantum systems—ones without exact or approximate conservation laws—goes back at least as far as investigations of highly-excited states in nuclei in the 1950s. It saw revivals in the 1980s with work on systems such as quantum billiards, that have only a few degrees of freedom, and also in the context of mesoscopic conductors. It is attracting renewed current interest with a focus on many-body systems that are spatially extended. Part of the motivation for this comes from experiments on cold atom systems, and part comes from development on the theoretical understanding of eigenstates of many-body systems. I will give an overview of recent work on minimal models for quantum chaos in spatially extended many-body quantum systems, describing simple models in which one can calculate spectral properties and study the dynamics of quantum information.

A. Chan, A. De Luca, and J. T. Chalker, Phys. Rev. Lett. 121, 060601 (2018) and Phys. Rev. X 8 , 041019 (2018)