Predrag Cvitanovic'
Noisy Chaos
Intuitively, the noise inherent in any realistic system washes out fine details and makes chaotic averages more robust. Quantum mechanical h-bar resolution of phase space implies that in semi-classical approaches no orbits longer than the Heisenberg time need be taken into account. We explore these ideas in some detail by casting stochastic dynamics into path integral form and developing perturbative and nonperturbative methods for evaluating such such integrals. In the weak noise case the standard perturbation theory is expansion in terms of Feynman diagrams. Now the surprise; we can compute the same corrections faster and to a higher order in perturbation theory by integrating over the neighborhood of a given saddlepoint exactly by means of a nonlinear change of field variables. The new perturbative expansion appears more compact than the standard Feynman diagram perturbation theory; whether it is better than traditional loop expansions for computing field-theoretic saddlepoint expansions remains to be seen, but for a simple system we study the result is a stochastic analog of the Gutzwiller trace formula with the $\hbar$ corrections so far computed to five orders higher than what has been attainable in the quantum-mechanical applications.
REFERENCES:
OVERHEADS: PART 2 - On spatiotemporal turbulence in terms of recurrent patterns
