The presence of chaotic motion in nuclear systems has been firmly related with the statistics of high-lying energy levels [8,9]. Poisson distributions of normalized spacings of successive nuclear or atomic excited levels with the same spin and parity correspond to integrable classical dynamics, while Wigner's statistics signal chaotic motion in the corresponding classical regime [10]. Intermediate situations are more difficult to assess. Very recently a proposal has been made to treat the spectral fluctuations δn as discrete time series [11]. Defining (1)δn=∫−∞En+1ρ˜(E)dE−n, with ρ˜(E) the mean level density which allows the mapping to dimensionless levels with unitary average level density, and analyzing the energy fluctuations as a discrete time series, they found that nuclear power spectra behave like 1f noise, postulating that this might be a characteristic signature of generic quantum chaotic systems. In the present work we implement this idea, using the 1f spectral behavior as a test for the presence of chaos in nuclear mass errors.
