Atomic Nucleus as a Chaotic System

Many-body quantum chaos turns out to be a driving force of many impor-tant phenomena in nuclear structure and nuclear reactions. A review of “chaotic ” physics and its manifestations, selected mostly by a personal in-terest, is presented. 1 “Regular ” and “Chaotic ” Dynamics A standard explanation of nuclear structure starts [1] with the independent quasi-particle picture of fermions in a self-consistent mean field. The next step is re-lated to the many-body states of such a system. The mean field determines the shape of the system, shell structure of the quasiparticle spectrum, magic numbers and in some cases predicts the main properties of low-lying states. The indepen-dent particle model cannot define the ground state of a system with more than one quasiparticles (quasiholes) with respect to the magic core. Here many op-portunities for angular momentum coupling produce degenerate states. Finally, the residual interaction between the quasiparticles lifts the degeneracies and con-verts Fermi-gas into Fermi-liquid