Lior Silberman will give the talk on Thursday, December 1 at 4:15 in Math 622. This lecture will be open to all.
Abstract:
The motion of a mechanical system can be described from the points of view
of both Classical and Quantum Mechanics. Observing that classical,
Newtonian, mechanics offers an excellent approximation to the motion of
everyday objects, we expect Quantum Mechanics to do the same. I will
describe attempts to formalize this expectation, known as the
"correspondence principle", and study its implications. In particular,
sufficiently complicated (chaotic) behaviour of the classical dynamics
should be visible in the quantum mechanical description, at least in limit
of sufficiently high energy.
I will first give a general introduction to this problem, known as the
"Quantum Chaos" problem. Most investigation has been numerical, but some
analytical results are known.
Secondly, I will describe recent advances on this problem in a class of
very special cases where the systems exhibit additional symmetries
associated with an additional "arithmetic" structure. Time premitting I will
explore connections to analytic number theory and combinatorics.
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