IFT Colloquium by Mark Srednicki (UC Santa Barbara): “Quantum chaos and the foundations of statistical mechanics”

Coffee: 11:00 / Ground-floor cafeteria

Date and time: 11:30h, Wednesday, 14 October 2026

Location: Blue Room

Speaker: Mark Srednicki, University of California, Santa Barbara

Title: “Quantum chaos and the foundations of statistical mechanics”

Abstract: Understanding the emergence of the rules of statistical mechanics for an isolated many-body system from an underlying quantum-mechanical microdynamics is a longstanding problem of
fundamental physics. Concepts from the theory of quantized classically chaotic systems can be used to resolve at least some of the key issues, and lead to the notion of “eigenstate
thermalization”: individual energy eigenstates of the system as a whole appear to be states of thermal equilibrium when probed by local (few-body) observables.