Universal scaling of spectral fluctuation transitions for interacting chaotic systems

The spectral properties of interacting strongly chaotic systems are investigated for growing interaction strength. A very sensitive transition from Poisson statistics to that of random matrix theory is found. We introduce a new random matrix ensemble modeling this dynamical symmetry breaking transition which turns out to be universal and depends on a single scaling parameter only. Coupled kicked rotors, a dynamical systems paradigm for such transitions, are compared with this ensemble and excellent agreement is found for the nearest-neighbor-spacing distribution. It turns out that this transition is described quite accurately using perturbation theory.