# Signatures of quantum chaos in nodal points and streamlines in electron transport through billiards

## I Introduction

Billiards play a predominant role in the study of classical and quantum chaos. Indeed, the nature of quantum chaos in a specific system is traditionally inferred from its its classical counterpart. Hence one may ask if quantum chaos is to be understood solely as a phenomenon that emerges in the classical limit, or are there some intrinsically quantal phenomena, which can contribute to irregular behavior in the quantum domain? This is a question we raise in connection with quantum transport through ideal regular and irregular electron billiards.

The seminal studies by McDonald and Kauffmann  of the morphology of eigenstates in a closed Bunimovich stadium have revealed characteristic patterns of disordered, undirectional and non-crossing nodal lines. Here we will first discuss what will happen to patterns like these when input and output leads are attached to a billiard, regular or irregular, and an electric current is induced through the the billiard by an applied voltage between the two leads. For such an open system the wave function $`\psi `$ is now a scattering state with both real and imaginary parts, each of which gives rise to separate sets of nodal lines at which either $`Re[\psi ]`$ or $`Im[\psi ]`$ vanish. How will the patterns of nodal lines evolve as, e.g., the energy of injected electrons is increased, i.e., more scattering channels become open. Could they tell us something about how the perturbing leads reduce symmetry and how an initially regular billiard may eventually turn into a chaotic one as the number open modes increase? Below we will argue that nodal points, i.e., the points at which the two sets of nodal lines intersect because $`Re[\psi ]=Im[\psi ]=0`$, carry important information in this respect. Thus we will study their spatial distributions and try to characterize chaos in terms of such distributions. The question we wish to ask is simply if one can find a distinct difference between the distributions for nominally regular and irregular cavities.

In addition, which other signatures of quantum chaos may one find in the coherent transport in open billiards? The spatial distribution of nodal points play a decisive role in how the flow pattern is shaped. Therefore we will also study the general behavior of streamlines derived from the probability current associated with a stationary scattering state

$$\psi =\sqrt{\rho }\mathrm{exp}(iS/\mathrm{})$$

The time independent Schrödinger equation can be decomposed as

$$E=\frac{1}{2}mv^2+V+V_{QM},$$

$$\rho 𝐯=0,m\dot{𝐗}=S.$$

The separate quantum streamlines are sometimes referred to as Bohm trajectories. In this alternative interpretation of quantum mechanics it is thought that an electron is a ”real” particle that follows a continuous and causally defined trajectory (streamline) with a well defined position $`𝐗`$ with the velocity of the particle given by the expressions above.

These equations imply that the electron moves under the action of a force which is not obtained entirely from the classical potential $`V`$, but also contains a ”quantum mechanical” potential

$$V_{QM}=\frac{\mathrm{}^2}{2m}\frac{^2\rho }{\rho }.$$

This quantum potential is negatively large where the wave function is small, and becomes infinite at the nodal points of the wave function where $`\rho (x,y)=0`$. Therefore, the close vicinity of a nodal point constitutes a forbidden area for quantum streamlines contributing to the net transport from source to drain. When $`\rho `$ does not vanish, $`S`$ is single valued and continuous. However at the nodal point where $`\psi =0`$, neither $`S`$ nor $`S`$ is well defined. The behavior of $`S`$ around these nodal points is discussed in a . For our study the main important property of the nodal points of $`\psi `$ is that the probability current flows described by ’open’ streamlines cannot encircle a nodal point. On the contrary, they are effectively repelled from the close vicinity of the nodal points, in a way as if these were impurities.

The scattering wave functions $`\psi `$ are found by solving the Schrödinger equation in a tight-binding approximation with the Neumann boundary conditions outside the billiards, on a distance over which evanescent modes effectively decay to zero. The energy of the incident electron is $`ϵ=20`$ where $`ϵ=2E_Fd^2m^{}/\mathrm{}`$ in which $`E_F`$ is the Fermi energy, $`d`$ the width of the channel, and $`m^{}`$ the effective mass.

## II Distributions of nodal points

An inspection of the two sets of nodal lines associated with the real and imaginary parts of the scattering wave function reveals the typical pattern of undirectional, self-avoiding nodal lines found already by McDonald and Kauffmann  for an isolated, irregular billiard. However, in our case of a complex scattering function the nodal lines are not uniquely defined because a multiplication of the wave function by an arbitrary constant phase factor exp$`(i\alpha )`$ would yield a different pattern. The nodal points, on the other hand, appear to helpful in this respect. They represent a new aspect of the open system and will obviously remain fixed upon a change of the phase of wave function. Here we conjecture that the nodal points may serve as unique markers which should useful for a quantitative characterization of scattering wave functions for open systems.

To be more specific, we have considered a large number of realizations (’samples’) of nodal points associated with different kinds of billiards and present averaged normalized distributions of nearest distances between the nodal points. Fig. 1 shows the distributions for open Sinai (a), Bunimovich (b) and rectangular billiards (c, d). The distributions are obtained as an average over 101 different values of energy belonging to a specific energy window in which the conductance undergoes a few oscillations as shown by the insets in Fig. 1. The cases (a, b, c) present two channel transmission through the billiards while the case (d) refers to five channel transmission. The rectangular billiard is nominally maximal in area with numerical size $`210\times 100`$ and with width of leads equal to 10.

It is noteworthy that the distribution of nearest neighbors is distinctly different from the corresponding distribution for random points in the two-dimensional plane 

$$g(r)=2\pi \rho r\mathrm{exp}(\pi \rho r^2),$$
$`(1)`$   
where a density $`\rho `$ of random points is related to mean separation $`<r>`$ as $`\rho =1/4<r>^2`$. This distribution is shown in Fig. 1 (a) by the thin line indicating an underlying correlation between the nodal points of transport wave function through the Sinai Billiard. In this sense quantum chaos is not randomness.

With slight deviations the Bunimovich billiard gives rise to the same distributions as the Sinai as shown by Fig. 1 (a,b). Analysis of the distributions for lower energies ($`ϵ20`$, one channel transmission) gives quite similar universal forms as shown in Fig. 1 (a, b), but with more pronounced fluctuations because the number of nodal points is less at lower energies. Moreover the average over wider energy domains with a finer grid or for higher energies gives no visible deviations from the distributions in Fig. 1 (a, b).

We considered also the Berry’s wave function of a chaotic billiard which is accepted as standart measure of quantum chaos :

$$\psi (x,y)=\underset{j}{}|a_j|\mathrm{exp}[ik(\mathrm{cos}\theta _jx+\mathrm{sin}\theta _jy)+\varphi _j]$$
$`(2)`$   
where $`\theta _j,|a_j|`$ and $`\varphi _j`$ are independent random variables. We found that distribution of nearest distances between the nodal points of (2) has completely the same form as for the Sinai billiard Fig. 1 (a). On the other hand an analysis of nodal points of wave function

$$\psi (x,y)=\underset{k_x,k_y}{}\mathrm{exp}(ik_xx+k_yy)$$
$`(3)`$   
with $`k_x,k_y`$ distributed randomly leads to the distribution (1) of random points.

To supplement the averaging over energy we have also considered the positions of leads. Fig. 2 (a) shows the normalized distribution of the nearest distances between nodal points for the Sinai billiard obtained as an average over 101 positions of the input lead. As seen this distribution has the same form as the energy averaged Sinai billiard in Fig. 1 (a). In the same way Fig. 2 (b) shows the corresponding case of the Bunimovich billiard with an asymmetric input lead to be compared with Fig. 1 (b). The unsymmetric arrangement of leads allows a larger number of eigenstates of the Bunimovich to participate in the electron transport because symmetry restrictions are relaxed.

On the basis of Figs. 1 and 2 and comparison with the Berry’s wave function (2) we therefore argue that there is a universal distribution that characterizes open chaotic billiards. At this stage we conclude that the form of the distributions is not sensitive to the averaging procedure, to the number of channels of electron transmission and to the type of attachment of leads. The mathematical form of the universal distribution constitues an interesting problem that remains to be solved. So does a derivation of the random distribution associated with wave function in eq. (3).

Let us now turn to the case of the nominally regular rectangular billiard. In Fig. 1 (c) the distribution functions are given for the case of two-channel transmission with the same energy averaging procedure as for the chaotic billiards. The nearest neighbor distribution clearly displays a peak corresponding to a regular set of nodal points in contrast to other billiards discussed above. This feature is found even for very high energies around 250 (five-channel transmission). Therefore the rectangular dot with the two symmetrically attached leads displays considerable stability with respect to regular nodal points in contrast to the chaotic Sinai and Bunimovich billiards.

As indicated, symmetric leads impose restrictions on how states inside the billiard are selected and mixed on injection of a particle. In Fig. 2 (c) the result of averaging over the positions of the input lead is therefore shown for the rectangular billiard at a fixed energy chosen from the energy domain in Fig. 1 (c). As may be expected the pronounced peak in the distribution function of nearest nodal points has now disappeared. Moreover, the distribution is close to the case of the Bunimovich billiard in Fig. 1 (b) and Fig. 2 (b). Evidently the non symmetrical positioning of leads disturb the nominally regular billiard in a much more profound way, effectively rendering it chaotic characteristics. To reconfirm this conclusion we have also performed calculations of distribution of nodal points within the same energy domain and the same number of energy steps as in Fig. 1 (c) but for non symmetrical positions of the input lead. In fact, the distribution function of nearest distances in Fig. 2 (d) demonstrates the close similarity with the position average of the nodal points. Therefore the non universal behavior of the distribution function of nodal points for the rectangular billiard shown in Fig. 1 (c, d) is the result of only a few symmetrical eigenstates taking part in the transmission because of symmetry restrictions.

In order to give a quantitative measure of disorder of nodal point patterns we consider the Shannon entropy $`S`$ normalized for each specific billiard by the entropy of fully random points. Numerical values for $`S`$ are specified in Figs. 1 and 2. As may be expected there is a clear tendency towards maximal entropy for chaotic billiards for the same energy window. A similar tendency is clearly seen for the position average (Fig. 2). A case of rectangular billiard with entropy 0.95 Fig. 1 (d) is beyond of this rule because for the five-channel transmission the number of nodal points substantially exceeds other considered cases irrespective of type of billiard. Thus the Shannon entropy of nodal points is important additional quantitative measure of quantum chaos for the quantum transport through billiards.

## III Streamlines

As mentioned above streamlines are strongly affected by the positions of nodal points. Superficially they play the role of impurities. It is therfore interesting issue if streamlines behave differently for regular and irregular situations and for this reason we will consider a few typical examples starting with two well defined systems, the nominally regular rectangle and the irregular Sinai billiard. Fig. 3 (a) shows the flow lines in the case of the rectangular billiard. The features of the flow lines connecting input and output leads are remarkable. It is clearly seen how the flow (trajectories) effectively ’channel’ through ’a nodal crystal’ avoiding the individual nodal points. This picture is evidently very different from semi-classical physics and periodic orbit theory. In Fig. 3 only contributions to the net current are displayed. In addition there are also vortical motions centered around each nodal point.

The other extreme, the completely chaotic Sinai billiard, is shown in Fig. 3 (b). Because the nodal distribution is now irregular also the streamlines form an irregular pattern when finding their way through the rough potential landscape. Since a streamline cannot cross itself Fig. 3 brings to mind the classical example of meandering rivers in a flat delta landscape. As well known, slight changes in the topography, for example, by moving only a few obstacles to new positions, may induce completely new flow patterns in a sometimes dramatic ways. In the same way slight variations of the energy, for example, may affect the quantum streamlines in the Sinai billiard in an endless way, occasionally forming more collected bunches connecting the two leads in a more focused way than in Fig. 3 (b). The same type of behavior has also been obtained for a two-dimensional ring in which a tiny variation of external magnetic flux induce drastic changes of the flowlines and, as a consequence, Aharonov-Bohm oscillations become irregular.

###### Acknowledgements.

This work has been partially supported by the INTAS-RFBR Grant 95-IN-RU-657, RFFI Grant 97-02-16305 and the Swedish Natural Science Research Council. The computations were in part performed at the National Supercomputer Centre at Linköping University.    

Figure captions