Dynamical chaos and decoherence

Abstract

Fidelity is a convenient tool to study the sensitivity of quantum motion under Hamiltonian perturbations. In this paper we first show that classical chaos can produce the dephasing necessary to suppress quantum interference, even in the absence of any environment. To this end we consider the fidelity of mixed states, which takes into account interference amplitudes, and directly relate its decay to the decay of an appropriate classical correlation function, which is totally unrelated to quantum phases. We then discuss the dephasing in a two-qubit system, induced by the coupling to a single-particle, deterministic chaotic environment. The latter is shown to behave as a pure dephasing many-body object which induces decoherence in the system; memory effects are also taken into account.