Quantum chaos and semiclassical behavior in mushroom billiards I: Spectral statistics

We study the aspects of quantum chaos in mushroom billiards introduced by Bunimovich. This family of billiards classically has the property of mixed phase space with precisely one entirely regular and one fully chaotic (ergodic) component, whose size depends on the width w of the stem, and has two limiting geometries, namely the circle (as the integrable system) and stadium (as the fully chaotic system). Therefore, this one-parameter system is ideal to study the semiclassical behavior of the quantum counterpart. Here, in paper I, we study the spectral statistics as a function of the geometry defined by w, and as a function of the semiclassical parameter k, which in this case is just the wavenumber k. We show that at sufficiently large k the level spacing distribution is excellently described by the Berry-Robnik (BR) distribution (without fitting). At lower k the small deviations from it can be well described by the Berry-Robnik-Brody (BRB) distribution, which captures the effects of weak dynamical localization of Poincaré-Husimi functions. We also employ the analytical theory of the level spacing ratios distribution P(r) for mixed-type systems, recently obtained by Yan (2025), which does not require a spectral unfolding procedure, and show excellent agreement with numerics in the semiclassical limit of large k. In paper II we shall analyze the eigenstates by means of Poincaré-Husimi functions.