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Physical Review A

Rates of quantum decoherence in regular and chaotic systems

Allan Tameshtit, John E. Sipe

Published Mar 1, 1993• 25 citations
Publisher

Abstract

We initiate a study of rates of quantum decoherence in regular and chaotic systems. The system of interest investigated is quite general, and the interaction with the surroundings is via a particular quantum-nondemolition coupling. We find that the averaged coherence, as measured by Tr${\mathrm{\ensuremath{\rho}}}^{2}$(t), decays faster asymptotically in chaotic than in regular systems; this is a direct result of the repulsion of energy levels in the former case. We also investigate the phenomenon of self-averaging, providing general conditions that ensure that averaged and unaveraged quantities, such as Tr${\mathrm{\ensuremath{\rho}}}^{2}$(t), coincide. We find good agreement between our analytic results and those obtained numerically for the circle and stadium billiards.

DOI
10.1103/physreva.47.1697

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We initiate a study of rates of quantum decoherence in regular and chaotic systems. The system of interest investigated is quite general, and the interaction with the surroundings is via a particular quantum-nondemolition coupling. We find that the averaged coherence, as measured by Tr\ensuremathρ2{\mathrm{\ensuremath{\rho}}}^{2}\ensuremathρ2(t), decays faster asymptotically in chaotic than in regular systems; this is a direct result of the repulsion of energy levels in the former case. We also investigate the phenomenon of self-averaging, providing general conditions that ensure that averaged and unaveraged quantities, such as Tr\ensuremathρ2{\mathrm{\ensuremath{\rho}}}^{2}\ensuremathρ2(t), coincide. We find good agreement between our analytic results and those obtained numerically for the circle and stadium billiards.
Making use of appropriate quantum-classical correspondence we have examined the differential behavior of regular and chaotic trajectories in terms of quantum decoherence, the evolution of average quantities, and variances and entropy in a driven double-well oscillator in contact with the surroundings. Our numerical analysis has shown that even on a short time scale the decay of the average quantum coherence is multiexponential. While the onset of decoherence is much faster for a regular trajectory, the decay is faster asymptotically for a chaotic trajectory compared to a regular one. The coupling of the system to the environment turns chaotic in a regular evolution. The environment also affects the evolution of quantum variances for a regular trajectory almost from the beginning, while it has an insignificant effect on chaotic evolution up to a time after which, for both trajectories, noise in the quantum variances exhibits remarkable suppression, although fluctuations of the reservoir modes, in general, tend to increase the level of variances. We identify three stages of quantum evolution; a short decoherence regime followed by a Liouville flow, the latter regime being dominated by the classical curvature of the potential. This is the regime at which growth of entropy or quantum variances is exponential, the rate being determined by the classical largest Lyapunov exponent. The last stage is the irreversible flow dominated by diffusion which suppresses noises in the quantum variances. \textcopyright{} 1996 The American Physical Society.
We compare quantum decoherence in generic regular and chaotic systems that interact with a thermal reservoir via a dipole coupling. Using a time-dependent, self-consistent approximation in the spirit of Hartree, we derive in the high temperature limit an expression for the off-diagonal elements of the system density operator that initially corresponds to a coherent superposition of two adjacent wave packets. We relate the decoherence rate to the Lyapunov exponent in the Ehrenfest regime. In this regime, the greater the instability of the system the faster the loss of coherence occurs.
Open quantum systems undergo decoherence, which is responsible for the transition from quantum to classical behavior. The time scale in which decoherence takes place can be analyzed using upper limits to its rate. We examine the dynamics of open chaotic quantum systems governed by random Lindblad operators sourced from Gaussian and Ginibre ensembles with Wigner-Dyson symmetry classes. In these systems, the ensemble-averaged purity decays monotonically as a function of time. This decay is governed by the decoherence rate, which is upper-bounded by the dimension of their Hilbert space and is independent of the ensemble symmetry. These findings hold upon mixing different ensembles, indicating the universal character of the decoherence rate limit. Moreover, our findings reveal that open chaotic quantum systems governed by random Lindbladians tend to exhibit the most rapid decoherence, regardless of the initial state. This phenomenon is associated with the concentration of the decoherence rate near its upper bound. Our work identifies primary features of decoherence in dissipative quantum chaos, with applications ranging from quantum foundations to high-energy physics and quantum technologies. Published by the American Physical Society 2024
We discuss the stability of quantum motion under system's perturbations in the light of the corresponding classical behavior. In particular we focus our attention on the so called "fidelity" or Loschmidt echo, its relation with the decay of correlations, and discuss the quantum-classical correspondence. We then report on the numerical simulation of the double-slit experiment, where the initial wave-packet is bounded inside a billiard domain with perfectly reflecting walls. If the shape of the billiard is such that the classical ray dynamics is regular, we obtain interference fringes whose visibility can be controlled by changing the parameters of the initial state. However, if we modify the shape of the billiard thus rendering classical (ray) dynamics fully chaotic, the interference fringes disappear and the intensity on the screen becomes the (classical) sum of intensities for the two corresponding one-slit experiments. Thus we show a clear and fundamental example in which transition to chaotic motion in a deterministic classical system, in absence of any external noise, leads to a profound modification in the quantum behavior.
The dynamical properties of quantum entanglement in the Dicke model without rotating-wave approximation are investigated in terms of the reduced-density linear entropy. The characteristic time of decoherence process in the early-time evolution is numerically obtained and it is shown that the characteristic time decreases as the coupling parameter increases. The mean entanglement, which is defined to be averaged over time, is employed to describe the influences of both quantum phase transition and corresponding classical chaos on the behavior of entanglement. For a given energy, initial conditions are taken to be minimum uncertainty wave packets centered at regular and chaotic regions of the classical phase space. It is shown that the entanglement has a distinct change at the quantum phase transition, and that the entanglement for regular initial conditions is smaller than that for chaotic ones in the case of weak coupling, while it fluctuates with small amplitude in strong coupling and for chaotic initial conditions.
We numerically investigate decoherence of a two-spin system (central system) by a bath of many spins 1/2. By carefully adjusting parameters, the dynamical regime of the bath has been varied from quantum chaos to regular, while all other dynamical characteristics have been kept practically intact. We explicitly demonstrate that for a many-body quantum bath, the onset of quantum chaos leads to significantly faster and stronger decoherence compared to an equivalent non-chaotic bath. Moreover, the non-diagonal elements of the system's density matrix, the linear entropy, and the fidelity of the central system decay differently for chaotic and non-chaotic baths. Therefore, knowledge of the basic parameters of the bath (strength of the system-bath interaction, and the bath's spectral density of states) is not always sufficient, and much finer details of the bath's dynamics can strongly affect the decoherence process.