Spatio-temporal Chaos and Vacuum Fluctuations of Quantized Fields

This book describes new applications for spatio-temporal chaotic dynamical systems in elementary particle physics and quantum field theories. The stochastic quantization approach of Parisi and Wu is extended to more general deterministic chaotic processes as generated by coupled map lattices. In particular, so-called chaotic strings are introduced as a suitable small-scale dynamics of vacuum fluctuations. This more general approach to second quantization reduces to the ordinary stochastic quantization scheme on large scales, but it also opens up interesting new perspectives: chaotic strings appear to minimize their vacuum energy for the observed numerical values of the free standard model parameters.