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I am a physics undergrad interested in stuff like dynamical systems, chaos theory etc. Is there ongoing research in these fields? I am talking about pure research and not applications to things like weather etc? I hope this question is appropriate for Physics SE. I asked this question, because I browsed through the websites of the physics departments of a few renowned universities (MIT, Princeton, Caltech) etc, but nowhere it mentioned research in these areas.

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Quick suggestion: Look at papers in Nonlinearity, iopscience.iop.org/0951-7715, and in JMathPhys to see where the authors of papers that are interesting to you come from. You should have access at least to JMathPhys through your university library. Look for what other journals those authors write in, and go through the roots and branches progressively. Hopefully you have or can find enough time not to have to hurry. This stuff is often studied as a separate discipline more in Math departments than in Physics departments, even though many Physicists know it intimately. – Peter Morgan Jun 15 '12 at 11:56
@PeterMorgan: can i extend the question to include quantum chaos and disordered systems? Could you provide me with some names in this field, and some universities which has research groups working on quantum disordered systems? – ramanujan_dirac Jun 19 '12 at 5:30
have a look at this list from MIT web.mit.edu/redingtn/www/netadv/Xcomplexit.html . Note that chaos is often coupled with complexity – anna v May 1 at 19:10

2 Answers

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Yes, there is investigation.

Some random names on the field (more on the physics side, NO specific order): Carl Dettmann, Tamás Tél, Ott, Ying-Cheng Lai, Adilson Motter, Celso Grebogi, Holger Kantz, Alessandro Moura, Eduardo G. Altmann, etc, etc, etc.

A quick search on some of these names should help you to find some recent papers on what is being done (not restricted to!).

Some specific topics on the subject with some activity:

Billiards, Transient chaos, Hamiltonian systems, quantum chaos, control theory.

Do not be biased by this information, use it has a shortcut to search more and more. It is not meant to represent anything in terms of importance, quantity or quality of the research.

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can i extend the question to include quantum chaos and disordered systems? Could you provide me with some names in this field, and some universities which has research groups working on quantum disordered systems? – ramanujan_dirac Jun 19 '12 at 5:30
@ramanujan_dirac The concepts of chaos theory and nonlinear dynamics are also useful to study the renormalization group flow beyond a single scale invariant fixed point as I hinted to in this answer. – Dilaton May 10 at 22:26
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There is of course research going on. For example the field of billiards is still very active. People study e.g. billiards with non-trivial reflection rules.

In general this is done in Math departments rather than Physics, although there are a lot of physicists working there.

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can i extend the question to include quantum chaos and disordered systems? Could you provide me with some names in this field, and some universities which has research groups working on quantum disordered systems? – ramanujan_dirac Jun 19 '12 at 5:30
Some names straight from mind and w/o completenes and order: A. Buchleitner, F. Haake, K. Nakamura, H. J. Stöckmann, M. Gutzwiller and many more. – user9886 Jun 19 '12 at 14:15

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