Hard chaos, quantum billiards, and quantum dot computers

摘要

This is the final report of a three-year, Laboratory-Directed Research and Development (LDRD) project at the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL). Research was performed in analytic and computational techniques for dealing with hard chaos, especially the powerful tool of cycle expansions. This work has direct application to the understanding of electrons in nanodevices, such as junctions of quantum wires, or in arrays of dots or antidots. We developed a series of techniques for computing the properties of quantum systems with hard chaos, in particular the flow of electrons through nanodevices. These techniques are providing the insight and tools to design computers with nanoscale components. Recent efforts concentrated on understanding the effects of noise and orbit pruning in chaotic dynamical systems. We showed that most complicated chaotic systems (not just those equivalent to a finite shift) will develop branch points in their cycle expansion. Once the singularity is known to exist, it can be removed with a dramatic increase in the speed of convergence of quantities of physical interest.