Integrable Aspects of Universal Quantum Transport in Chaotic Cavities

TL;DR

This paper explores the integrable structures underlying quantum conductance fluctuations in chaotic cavities, revealing connections to Painlevé transcendents and Toda Lattice, and demonstrating the robustness of these integrable features under realistic tunneling effects.

Contribution

It establishes a link between quantum transport in chaotic cavities and integrable systems, specifically showing how Painlevé V and Toda Lattice describe conductance and noise fluctuations.

Findings

Cumulants of conductance are given by Painlevé V coefficients.

Painlevé transcendent also describes noise power fluctuations.

Integrability persists even with tunneling effects in point contacts.

Abstract

The Painlev\'e transcendents discovered at the turn of the XX century by pure mathematical reasoning, have later 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 an one-dimensional Toda Lattice and the fifth Painlev\'e 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 Painlev\'e V function. Further, the relevance of the fifth Painlev\'e 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.