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Physical Review E

Irreversible evolution of quantum chaos

A. Ugulava, L. Chotorlishvili, K. Nickoladze

Published May 26, 2005• 18 citations
Publisher

Abstract

The pendulum is the simplest system having all the basic properties inherent in dynamic stochastic systems. In the present paper we investigate the pendulum with the aim to reveal the properties of a quantum analogue of dynamic stochasticity or, in other words, to obtain the basic properties of quantum chaos. It is shown that a periodic perturbation of the quantum pendulum (similarly to the classical one) in the neighborhood of the separatrix can bring about irreversible phenomena. As a result of recurrent passages between degenerate states, the system gets self-chaotized and passes from the pure state to the mixed one. Chaotization involves the states, the branch points of whose levels participate in a slow "drift" of the system along the Mathieu characteristics this "drift" being caused by a slowly changing variable field. Recurrent relations are obtained for populations of levels participating in the irreversible evolution process. It is shown that the entropy of the system first grows and, after reaching the equilibrium state, acquires a constant value.

DOI
10.1103/physreve.71.056211

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The pendulum is the simplest system having all the basic properties inherent in dynamic stochastic systems. In the present paper we investigate the pendulum with the aim to reveal the properties of a quantum analogue of dynamic stochasticity or, in other words, to obtain the basic properties of quantum chaos. It is shown that a periodic perturbation of the quantum pendulum (similarly to the classical one) in the neighborhood of the separatrix can bring about irreversible phenomena. As a result of recurrent passages between degenerate states, the system gets self-chaotized and passes from the pure state to the mixed one. Chaotization involves the states, the branch points of whose levels participate in a slow "drift" of the system along the Mathieu characteristics this "drift" being caused by a slowly changing variable field. Recurrent relations are obtained for populations of levels participating in the irreversible evolution process. It is shown that the entropy of the system first grows and, after reaching the equilibrium state, acquires a constant value.
The quantum-mechanical investigation of nonlinear resonance in terms of approximation to moderate nonlinearity is reduced to the investigation of eigenfunctions and eigenvalues of the Mathieu-Schrodinger equation. The eigenstates of the Mathieu-Schrodinger equation are nondegenerate in a certain area of pumping amplitude values in the neighborhood of the classical separatrix. Outside this area, the system finds itself in a degenerate state for both small and large pumping amplitude values. Degenerate energy terms arise as a result of merging and branching of pairs of nondegenerate energy terms. Equations are obtained for finding the merging points of energy terms. These equations are solved by numerical methods. The main objective of this paper is to establish a quantum analog of the classical stochastic layer formed in the separatrix area. With this end in view, we consider a nonstationary quantum-mechanical problem of perturbation of the state of the Mathieu-Schrodinger equation. It is shown that in passing through the branching point the system may pass from the pure state to the mixed one. At multiple passages through branching points there develops the irreversible process of "creeping" of the system to quantum states. In that case, the observed population of a certain number of levels can be considered, in our opinion, to be a quantum analog of the stochastic layer. The number of populated levels is defined by a perturbation amplitude.
Quantum chaos is presented as a paradigm of information processing by dynamical systems at the bottom of the range of phase-space scales. Starting with a brief review of classical chaos as entropy flow from micro- to macro-scales, I argue that quantum chaos came as an indispensable rectification, removing inconsistencies related to entropy in classical chaos: bottom-up information currents require an inexhaustible entropy production and a diverging information density in phase-space, reminiscent of Gibbs' paradox in statistical mechanics. It is shown how a mere discretization of the state space of classical models already entails phenomena similar to hallmarks of quantum chaos and how the unitary time evolution in a closed system directly implies the "quantum death" of classical chaos. As complementary evidence, I discuss quantum chaos under continuous measurement. Here, the two-way exchange of information with a macroscopic apparatus opens an inexhaustible source of entropy and lifts the limitations implied by unitary quantum dynamics in closed systems. The infiltration of fresh entropy restores permanent chaotic dynamics in observed quantum systems. Could other instances of stochasticity in quantum mechanics be interpreted in a similar guise? Where observed quantum systems generate randomness, could it result from an exchange of entropy with the macroscopic meter? This possibility is explored, presenting a model for spin measurement in a unitary setting and some preliminary analytical results based on it.
The evolution of classically chaotic quantum systems is analyzed within the formalism of Quantum Pseudo-Probability Distributions. Due to the deep connections that a quantum system shows with its classical correspondent in this representation, the Pseudo-Probability formalism appears to be a useful method of investigation in the field of "Quantum Chaos." In the first part of the thesis we generalize this formalism to quantum systems containing spin operators. It is shown that a classical-like equation of motion for the pseudo-probability distribution ρw can be constructed, dρw/dt = (L_CL + L_QGD)ρw, which is rigorously equivalent to the quantum von Neumann-Liouville equation. The operator L_CL is undistinguishable from the classical operator that generates the semiclassical equations of motion. In the case of the spin-boson system this operator produces semiclassical chaos and is responsible for quantum irreversibility and the fast growth of quantum uncertainty. Carrying out explicit calculations for a spin-boson Hamiltonian the joint action of L_CL and L_QGD is illustrated. It is shown that the latter operator, L_QGD makes the spin system 'remember' its quantum nature, and competes with the irreversibility induced by the former operator. In the second part we test the idea of the enhancement of the quantum uncertainty triggered by the classical chaos by investigating the analogous effect of diffusive excitation in periodically kicked quantum systems. The classical correspondents of these quantum systems exhibit, in the chaotic region, diffusive behavior of the unperturbed energy. For the Quantum Kicked Harmonic Oscillator, in the case of quantum resonances, we provide an exact solution of the quantum evolution. This proves the existence of a deterministic drift in the energy increase over time of the system considered. More generally, this "superdiffusive" excitation of the energy is due to coherent quantum mechanical tunnelling between degenerate tori of the classical phase space. In conclusion we find that some of the quantum effects resulting from this fast increase do not have any classical counterpart, they are mainly tunnelling processes. This seems to be the first observation of an effect of this kind.
Quantum chaos has been demonstrated in several studies of the interaction between N two-level quantum systems and a single-mode radiation field interacting in a resonant cavity. It has been shown that the mechanism for this chaos is dynamically identical to a periodically perturbed, near-separatrix motion of a pendulum. Identification of this mechanism followed from examination of the rotating-wave approximation and corrections to this approximation. Our earlier study established the nature of the corrections on the basis of numerical simulation experiments and heuristic arguments. In this paper we invoke an averaging procedure which enables us to systematically establish the form of these corrections. We first apply this procedure to the Rabi model in order to illustrate its utility and exhibit its structure, and then we apply it to the more complicated problem of quantum chaos.
The rigid pendulum, both as a classical and as a quantum problem, is an interesting system as it has the exactly soluble harmonic oscillator and the rigid rotor systems as limiting cases in the low- and high-energy limits respectively. The energy variation of the classical periodicity (tau\\tautau) is also dramatic, having the special limiting case of tautoinfty\\tau \\to \\inftytautoinfty at the 'top' of the classical motion (i.e. the separatrix.) We study the time-dependence of the quantum pendulum problem, focusing on the behavior of both the (approximate) classical periodicity and especially the quantum revival and superrevival times, as encoded in the energy eigenvalue spectrum of the system. We provide approximate expressions for the energy eigenvalues in both the small and large quantum number limits, up to 4th order in perturbation theory, comparing these to existing handbook expansions for the characteristic values of the related Mathieu equation, obtained by other methods. We then use these approximations to probe the classical periodicity, as well as to extract information on the quantum revival and superrevival times. We find that while both the classical and quantum periodicities increase monotonically as one approaches the 'top' in energy, from either above or below, the revival times decrease from their low- and high-energy values until very near the separatrix where they increase to a large, but finite value.