Graduate Student / Postdoc Seminar

---

Quantum Chaos

Speaker: Alex Cohen, Courant Institute, New York University

Location: Warren Weaver Hall 1302

Date: Friday, October 17, 2025, 1 p.m.

Synopsis:

The geodesic flow on a hyperbolic manifold is one of the simplest examples of chaotic dynamics: almost every trajectory equidistributes, but exceptional ones can come back to themselves or stay trapped near fractal sets. In quantum mechanics, we look at high-frequency waves instead of particle trajectories. The conjectural picture is that, unlike particles, waves should always spread evenly, since the uncertainty principle prevents them from remaining concentrated near special sets. I will discuss some theorems and conjectures related to this phenomenon.