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Acta Physica Sinica (Overseas Edition)

Sensitivity to perturbation in quantum chaotic system

Jie Quan-Lin, Gong-ou Xu

Published Sep 1, 1995• 0 citations
Publisher

Abstract

Numerical results show that, for quantum autonomous chaotic system, the evolution of initially coherent states are sensitive to perturbation. The overlap of a perturbed state with the unperturbed one decays exponentially, which is followed by fluctuation around N-1, N being the dimension of the Hilbert space. The matrix elements of the evolution operator in interaction picture tend to be a random distribution after sufficiently long time, where the interaction is the perturbation, even when the perturbation is very weak. The difference between a regular system and the chaotic one is shown clearly. In a regular system, the overlap shows strong revival. The distribution of the evolution matrix has only a few dominant terms.

DOI
10.1088/1004-423x/4/9/001

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Numerical results show that, for quantum autonomous chaotic system, the evolution of initially coherent states are sensitive to perturbation. The overlap of a perturbed state with the unperturbed one decays exponentially, which is followed by fluctuation around N-1, N being the dimension of the Hilbert space. The matrix elements of the evolution operator in interaction picture tend to be a random distribution after sufficiently long time, where the interaction is the perturbation, even when the perturbation is very weak. The difference between a regular system and the chaotic one is shown clearly. In a regular system, the overlap shows strong revival. The distribution of the evolution matrix has only a few dominant terms.
The evolution of a quantum state is altered when a small perturbation is added to the Hamiltonian. As time progresses, the overlap of the perturbed and unperturbed states gives an indication of the stability of quantum motion. It is shown that if a quantum system has a classically chaotic analog, this overlap tends to a very small value, with small fluctuations. On the other hand, if the classical analog is regular, the overlap remains appreciable (on a time average) and its fluctuations are much larger.
Using the key properties of chaos, i.e. ergodicity and exponential instability, as a resource to control classical dynamics has a long and considerable history. However, in the context of controlling "chaotic" quantum unitary dynamics, the situation is far more tenuous. The classical concepts of exponential sensitivity to trajectory initial conditions and ergodicity do not directly translate into quantum unitary evolution. Nevertheless properties inherent to quantum chaos can take on those roles: i) the dynamical sensitivity to weak perturbations, measured by the fidelity decay, serves a similar purpose as the classical sensitivity to initial conditions; and ii) paired with the fact that quantum chaotic systems are conjectured to be statistically described by random matrix theory, implies a method to translate the ergodic feature into the control of quantum dynamics. With those two properties, it can be argued that quantum chaotic dynamical systems, in principle, allow for full controllability beyond a characteristic time that scales only logarithmically with system size and ℏ−1\hbar^{-1}ℏ−1. In the spirit of classical targeting, it implies that it is possible to fine tune the immense quantum interference with weak perturbations and steer the system from any initial state into any desired target state, subject to constraints imposed by conserved quantities. In contrast, integrable dynamics possess neither ergodicity nor exponential instability, and thus the weak perturbations apparently must break the integrability for control purposes. The main ideas are illustrated with the quantum kicked rotor. The production of revivals, cat-like entangled states, and the transition from any random state to any other random state is possible as demonstrated.
For the quantum kicked top we study numerically the distribution of Hilbert-space vectors evolving in the presence of a small random perturbation. For an initial coherent state centered in a chaotic region of the classical dynamics, the evolved perturbed vectors are distributed essentially like random vectors in Hilbert space. In contrast, for an initial coherent state centered near an elliptic (regular) fixed point of the classical dynamics, the evolved perturbed vectors remain close together, explore only a few dimensions of Hilbert space, and do not explore them randomly. These results support and extend the results of earlier studies, thereby providing additional support for a characterization of quantum chaos that uses concepts from information theory.
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Classical chaotic dynamics is characterized by exponential sensitivity to initial conditions. Quantum mechanics, however, does not show this feature. We consider instead the sensitivity of quantum evolution to perturbations in the Hamiltonian. This is observed as an attenuation of the Loschmidt echo M(t), i.e., the amount of the original state (wave packet of width sigma) which is recovered after a time reversed evolution, in the presence of a classically weak perturbation. By considering a Lorentz gas of size L, which for large L is a model for an unbounded classically chaotic system, we find numerical evidence that, if the perturbation is within a certain range, M(t) decays exponentially with a rate 1/tau(phi) determined by the Lyapunov exponent lambda of the corresponding classical dynamics. This exponential decay extends much beyond the Eherenfest time t(E) and saturates at a time t(s) approximately equal to lambda(-1)ln[N], where N approximately (L/sigma)(2) is the effective dimensionality of the Hilbert space. Since tau(phi) quantifies the increasing uncontrollability of the quantum phase (decoherence) its characterization and control has fundamental interest.
We compare the influence of perturbations of classically regular respectively chaotic Hamiltonians on their eigenfunctions. A generic measure of the perturbation strength is given by the average spreading width, which semiclassically is a phase-space integral. Thus, contrary to common assumption, the spreading width cannot be an indicator of regularity or chaos. The distribution of expansion coefficients of perturbed eigenfunctions in terms of unperturbed ones is markedly different for the two cases and may serve as a quantum signature of chaos referring to states rather than to spectra.