Supervisor: Lars Bojer Madsen

Chaos is something we encounter a tremendous amount of every day: It is in everything from the flow of fluids, the weather to the stock market. So it is only natural to ask the question “where is the chaos in quantum mechanics?” As per Bohr’s correspondence principle; classical mechanics should emerge from quantum mechanics in the regime of large quantum numbers – so one might expect the existence of a quantum mechanical analog of a classically chaotic system. It turns out, however, that it is not an easy question to answer. Nevertheless, the endeavor of attempting to answer such a question has led to a plethora of curious phenomena, for example quantum scars and energy level repulsion.

In this colloquium, I will present some of the difficulties in uniting classical chaos and quantum mechanics and showcase some of the efforts put into this, as well as a selection of phenomena and potential applications that have come from this.