STATISTICAL PROPERTIES OF HIGHLY EXCITED QUANTUM EIGENSTATES OF A STRONGLY CHAOTIC SYSTEM

Statistical properties of highly excited quantal eigenstates are studied for the free motion (geodesic flow) on a compact surface of constant negative curvature (hyperbolic octagon) which represents a strongly chaotic system (K-system). The eigenstates are expanded in a circular-wave basis, and it turns out that the expansion coefficients behave as Gaussian pseudo-random numbers. It is shown that this property leads to a Gaussian amplitude distribution P(PSI) in the semiclassical limit, i.e. the wave-functions behave as Gaussian random functions. This behaviour, which should hold for chaotic systems in general, is nicely confirmed for eigenstates lying 10 000 states above the ground state thus probing the semiclassical limit. In addition, the autocorrelation function and the path-correlation function are calculated and compared with a crude semiclassical Bessel-function approximation. Agreement with the semiclassical prediction is only found, if a local averaging is performed over roughly 1000 de Broglie wavelengths. On smaller scales, the eigenstates show much more structure than predicted by the first semiclassical approximation.