BOOK REVIEW: The Geometric Phase in Quantum Systems

Abstract

The book represents the collected lectures given at the Summer School on Mathematical Aspects of Quantum Maps held at Bologna University in September 2001. Quantum maps gained their prominence as a testing ground for mathematical understanding of various concepts in quantum chaos, such as the spectral statistics, quantum ergodicity, scarring of the eigenfunctions and the connection to algebraic number theory. The book is nicely structured. It begins by reviewing the relevant concepts and results from dynamical systems (a contribution by A Knauf) and number theory (by Z Rudnick). A contribution by the editors, M Degli Esposti and S Graffi, explains the quantization procedure for the quantum maps and proceeds to discuss some properties of the quantized maps, such as ergodicity and scarring, and the number theoretical techniques involved in proving these properties. The contribution by A B?acker discusses the numerical methods used to study quantum chaotic systems. It contains both the mathematical background and a detailed explanation of the numerical techniques, possible pitfalls at the implementation stage and how to avoid them. It even contains a computer program in Python used by the author to compute the eigenvalues of a perturbed cat map. The last contribution, by R Artuso, while very interesting in itself, feels somewhat disconnected from the rest of the book. It deals with deterministic transport in hyperbolic and weakly chaotic systems, where one can observe normal and anomalous diffusion respectively. Although being a collection of contributions from various authors, the book feels very much like a well-coordinated team effort, with frequent cross-contributional references underlying the connections between different facets of the discussed subjects. I consider it an invaluable reference for researchers in the field of quantum chaos and would recommend it as a first read for people just entering the field. It contains both the necessary background information and tasters of the main results and concepts of quantum chaos. The only slight drawback of the book is the misprints in some of the contributions, which can make an understanding more difficult than it should be.