Quantum Fluids and Classical Determinants

Abstract

A "quasiclassical" approximation to the quantum spectrum of the Schroedinger equation is obtained from the trace of a quasiclassical evolution operator for the "hydrodynamical" version of the theory, in which the dynamical evolution takes place in the extended phase space $[q(t),p(t),M(t)] = [q_i, \partial_i S, \partial_i \partial_j S ]$. The quasiclassical evolution operator is multiplicative along the classical flow, the corresponding quasiclassical zeta function is entire for nice hyperbolic flows, and its eigenvalue spectrum contains the spectrum of the semiclassical zeta function. The advantage of the quasiclassical zeta function is that it has a larger analyticity domain than the original semiclassical zeta function; the disadvantage is that it contains eigenvalues extraneous to the quantum problem. Numerical investigations indicate that the presence of these extraneous eigenvalues renders the original Gutzwiller-Voros semiclassical zeta function preferable in practice to the quasiclassical zeta function presented here. The cumulant expansion of the exact quantum mechanical scattering kernel and the cycle expansion of the corresponding semiclassical zeta function part ways at a threshold given by the topological entropy; beyond this threshold quantum mechanics cannot resolve fine details of the classical chaotic dynamics.