We study the Hamiltonian of a two-level system interacting with a one-mode radiation field by means of the Wigner method and without using the rotating-wave approximation. We show that a phenomenon of collapses and revival, reminiscent of that exhibited by the Jaynes-Cumming model, takes place in the high coupling limit. This process appears as irreversible or virtually reversible, according to whether the semiclassical regime is chaotic or not. Thus we find a new mechanism for dissipation in the quantum domain.
The concept of quantum revivals is extended to many-body systems and the implications of traversing a quantum phase transition are explored. By analyzing two different models, the vibron model for the bending of polyatomic molecules and the Dicke model for a quantum radiation field interacting with a system of two-level atoms, we show evidence of revival behavior for wave packets centered around energy levels as low as the fundamental state. Away from criticality, revival times exhibit smooth, nonsingular behavior and are proportional to the system size. Upon approaching a quantum critical point, they diverge as a power law and scale with the system size, although the scaling is no longer linear.
We investigate the dimension of the phase-space attractor of a quantum chaotic many-body ratchet in the mean-field limit. Specifically, we explore a driven Bose-Einstein condensate in three distinct dynamical regimes---Rabi oscillations, chaos, and self-trapping regimes---and for each of them we calculate the correlation dimension. For the ground state of the ratchet formed by a system of field-free noninteracting particles, we find four distinct pockets of chaotic dynamics throughout these regimes. We show that a measurement of local density in each of the dynamical regimes has an attractor characterized by a higher fractal dimension, ${D}_{R}=2.59\ifmmode\pm\else\textpm\fi{}0.01$, ${D}_{C}=3.93\ifmmode\pm\else\textpm\fi{}0.04$, and ${D}_{S}=3.05\ifmmode\pm\else\textpm\fi{}0.05$, compared to the global measure of current, ${D}_{R}=2.07\ifmmode\pm\else\textpm\fi{}0.02$, ${D}_{C}=2.96\ifmmode\pm\else\textpm\fi{}0.05$, and ${D}_{S}=2.30\ifmmode\pm\else\textpm\fi{}0.02$. The deviation between local and global measurements of the attractor's dimension corresponds to an increase towards higher condensate depletion, which remains constant for long time scales in both Rabi and chaotic regimes. The depletion is found to scale polynomially with particle number
N, namely, as ${N}^{\ensuremath{\beta}}$ with ${\ensuremath{\beta}}_{R}=0.51\ifmmode\pm\else\textpm\fi{}0.004$ and ${\ensuremath{\beta}}_{C}=0.18\ifmmode\pm\else\textpm\fi{}0.004$ for the two regimes. Thus, we find a strong deviation from the mean-field results, especially in the chaotic regime of the quantum ratchet. The ratchet also reveals quantum revivals in the Rabi and self-trapping regimes but not in the chaotic regime, with revival times scaling linearly in particle number for Rabi dynamics. Based on the obtained results, we outline pathways for the identification and characterization of emergent phenomena in driven many-body systems. This includes the identification of many-body localization from the many-body measures of the system, the influence of entanglement on the rate of the convergence to the mean-field limit, and the establishment of a polynomial scaling of the Ehrenfest time at which the mean-field description fails to describe the dynamics of the system.