APS » PROLA » Phys. Rev. Lett. » Volume 79 » Issue 21

Phys. Rev. Lett. 79, 4131 - 4134 (1997)

Exponentially Rapid Decoherence of Quantum Chaotic Systems

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Arjendu K. Pattanayak and Paul Brumer
Chemical Physics Theory Group, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M5S 3H6

Received 21 July 1997

We use a recent result to show that the rate of loss of coherence of a quantum system increases with increasing system phase-space structure and that a chaotic quantal system in the semiclassical limit decoheres exponentially with rate 2λ2, where λ2 is a generalized Lyapunov exponent. As a result, for example, the dephasing time for classically chaotic systems goes to infinity logarithmically with the temperature, in accord with recent experimental results.


©1997 The American Physical Society

URL: http://link.aps.org/abstract/PRL/v79/p4131
DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.79.4131
PACS: 05.45.+b, 03.65.Sq, 05.40.+j

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