Abstract
A fundamental relation exists between the statistical properties of the fluctuations of the energy-level spectrum of a Hamiltonian and the chaotic properties of the physical system it describes. This relationship has been addressed previously as a signature of chaos in quantum dynamical systems.
In order to properly analyze these fluctuations, however, it is necessary to separate them from the general tendency, namely, its secular part. Unfortunately this process, called unfolding, is not trivial and can lead to erroneous conclusions about the chaoticity of a system.
In this paper we propose a technique to improve the unfolding procedure for the purpose of minimizing the dependence on the particular procedure. This technique is based on detrending the fluctuations of the unfolded spectra through the empirical mode decomposition method.