English

Defining classical and quantum chaos through adiabatic transformations

Statistical Mechanics 2026-02-23 v4 Chaotic Dynamics Quantum Physics

Abstract

We propose a formalism which defines chaos in both quantum and classical systems in an equivalent manner by means of \textit{adiabatic transformations}. The complexity of adiabatic transformations which preserve classical time-averaged trajectories (quantum eigenstates) in response to Hamiltonian deformations serves as a measure of chaos. This complexity is quantified by the (properly regularized) fidelity susceptibility. Physically this measure quantifies long time instabilities of physical observables due to small changes in the Hamiltonian of the system. Our exposition clearly showcases the common structures underlying quantum and classical chaos and allows us to distinguish integrable, chaotic but non-thermalizing, and ergodic/mixing regimes. We apply the fidelity susceptibility to a model of two coupled spins and demonstrate that it successfully predicts the universal onset of chaos, both for finite spin SS and in the classical limit SS\to\infty. Interestingly, we find that finite SS effects are anomalously large close to integrability.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2401.01927,
  title  = {Defining classical and quantum chaos through adiabatic transformations},
  author = {Hyeongjin Kim and Cedric Lim and Kirill Matirko and Anatoli Polkovnikov and Michael O. Flynn},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2401.01927},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

V4: Added pedagogical discussions in introductory sections, in addition to new references and more data for a classical spin model at intermediate integrability breaking

R2 v1 2026-06-28T14:08:08.668Z