Integrable Aspects of Universal Quantum Transport in Chaotic Cavities

Abstract

The Painlevé transcendents discovered at the turn of the twentieth century by pure mathematical reasoning have since made their surprising appearance—much in the way of Wigner’s “miracle of appropriateness”—in various problems of theoretical physics. The notable examples include the two-dimensional Ising model, one-dimensional impenetrable Bose gas, corner and polynuclear growth models, one-dimensional directed polymers, string theory, two-dimensional quantum gravity, and spectral distributions of random matrices. In the present contribution, ideas of integrability are utilized to advocate emergence of a one-dimensional Toda lattice and the fifth Painlevé transcendent in the paradigmatic problem of conductance fluctuations in quantum chaotic cavities coupled to the external world via ballistic point contacts. Specifically, the cumulants of the Landauer conductance of a cavity with broken time-reversal symmetry are proven to be furnished by the coefficients of a Taylor-expanded Painlevé V function. Further, the relevance of the fifth Painlevé transcendent for a closely related problem of sample-to-sample fluctuations of the noise power is discussed. Finally, it is demonstrated that inclusion of tunneling effects inherent in realistic point contacts does not destroy the integrability: in this case, conductance fluctuations are shown to be governed by a two-dimensional Toda lattice.