Spectral-statistics properties of the experimental and theoretical light baryon and meson spectra

TL;DR

This paper compares the spectral fluctuation properties of experimental and theoretical light baryon and meson spectra, revealing that experiments exhibit chaotic characteristics while models tend to be more regular, highlighting differences in dynamical complexity.

Contribution

It introduces a new statistical method for analyzing fluctuation properties of very short spectral sequences and applies it to compare experimental and theoretical spectra.

Findings

Experimental spectra align with chaotic system predictions from Random Matrix Theory.

Theoretical models tend to resemble integrable systems, differing from experimental data.

The new method effectively analyzes short spectral sequences for fluctuation properties.

Abstract

We compare the statistical fluctuation properties of the baryon and meson experimental mass spectra with those obtained from theoretical models (quark models and lattice QCD). We find that for the experimental spectra the statistical properties are close to those predicted by Random Matrix Theory for chaotic systems, while for the theoretical ones they are in general closer to those predicted for integrable systems and safely incompatible with those of chaotic systems. We stress the importance of the agreement of the fluctuation properties between experiment and theoretical models, as they determine the dynamical regime and the complexity of the real interactions. We emphasize the new statistical method we use, adapted for properly analyzing the fluctuation properties for very short spectral sequences.