Chaos-assisted tunneling as a new tool for quantum simulation ; L'effet tunnel assisté par le chaos comme nouvel outil pour la simulation quantique

Tunneling is an emblematic manifestation of the wave nature of matter. It describes the passage of quantum particles through classically forbidden barriers of energy. When it occurs in systems whose classical dynamics is mixed, that is to say intermediate between chaotic and regular, tunneling is a much richer process than presented in introductory books to quantum mechanics. Indeed, in the classical phase space of such systems, regular orbits organize themselves into stable islands surrounded by a sea of unstable chaotic orbits. Tunneling between regular islands is then partially mediated by ergodic states in the chaotic sea. One of the striking signatures of this chaos-assisted tunneling is the existence of resonances of the oscillation frequency between two neighboring sites. In this thesis we report, in collaboration with an experimental team at LCAR in Toulouse, the first observation of these resonances in a quantum system, with a a cold atom experiment. We also present a generalization of this transport mechanism to driven optical lattices that form in phase space a chain of stable islands surrounded by the same chaotic sea. We show that chaos- assisted tunneling results in very long-range couplings between islands, whose fluctuations statistical propreties are universal. These long-range couplings could be used in the field of quantum simulation to experimentally access new classes of systems, difficult to achieve otherwise, in particular critical disordered systems. The last part of this manuscript is devoted to the study of such critical disordered systems, e.g. at the Anderson transition, whose quantum states are multifractals: they are delocalized but not ergodic and have remarkable scaling properties. We characterize the dynamics of these systems by describing the role of multifractality on the coherent scattering of a plane wave. This study is an important step towards the experimental characterization of multifractality in a quantum system, which remains up to now very difficult by other methods. ...