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Chaos in fermionic many-body systems and the metal-insulator transition

Publication at Faculty of Mathematics and Physics |
2011

Abstract

We show that finite Fermi systems governed by a mean field and a few-body interaction generically possess spectral fluctuations of the Wigner-Dyson type and are, thus, chaotic. Our argument is based on an analogy to the metal-insulator transition.

We construct a sparse random-matrix scaffolding ensemble (ScE) that mimics this transition. Our claim then follows from the fact that the generic random-matrix ensemble modeling a fermionic interacting many-body system is much less sparse than ScE.