Universal spectral correlations from the ballistic sigma model

A review of sigma models for quantum chaotic dynamics

We review the construction of the supersymmetric sigma model for unitary maps, using the color-flavor transformation. We then illustrate applications by three case studies in quantum chaos. In two of these cases, general Floquet maps and quantum graphs, we show that universal spectral fluctuations arise provided the pertinent classical dynamics are fully chaotic (ergodic and with decay rates sufficiently gapped away from zero). In the third case, the kicked rotor, we show how the existence of arbitrarily long-lived modes of excitation (diffusion) precludes universal fluctuations and entails quantum localization.

Resummation and the semiclassical theory of spectral statistics

We address the question as to why, in the semiclassical limit, classically chaotic systems generically exhibit universal quantum spectral statistics coincident with those of random-matrix theory. To do so, we use a semiclassical resummation formalism that explicitly preserves the unitarity of the quantum time evolution by incorporating duality relations between short and long classical orbits. This allows us to obtain both the non-oscillatory and the oscillatory contributions to spectral correlation functions within a unified framework, thus overcoming a significant problem in previous approaches. In addition, our results extend beyond the universal regime to describe the system-specific approach to the semiclassical limit.