A New Window Onto Quantum Chaos

John Evans, Fredrick Michael

Published 2002-08-07Version 1

In this article the statistical properties of symmetrical random matrices whose elements are drawn from a q-parameterized non-extensive statistics power-law distribution are investigated. In the limit as q->1 the well known Gaussian orthogonal ensemble (GOE) results are recovered. The relevant level spacing distribution is derived and one obtains a suitably generalized non-extensive Wigner distribution which depends on the value of the tunable non-extensivity parameter q. This non-extensive Wigner distribution can be seen to be a one-parameter level-spacing distribution that allows one to interpolate between chaotic and nearly integrable regimes.