The Role of the Environment in Chaotic Quantum Dynamics

We study how the interaction with an external incoherent environment induces a crossover from quantum to classical behavior for a particle whose classical motion is chaotic. Posing the problem in the semiclassical regime, we find that noise produced by the bath coupling rather than dissipation is primarily responsible for the dephasing that results in the ``classicalization'' of the particle. We find that the bath directly alters the phase space structures that signal the onset of classical chaos. This dephasing is shown to have a semiclassical interpretation: the noise renders the interfering paths indistinguishable and therefore incoherent. The noise is also shown to contribute to the quantum inhibition of mixing by creating new paths that interfere coherently.Comment: 10 pages RevTex. Three figures in Postscript as a uuencoded compressed tar file have been submitted as wel

The Inhibition of Mixing in Chaotic Quantum Dynamics

We study the quantum chaotic dynamics of an initially well-localized wave packet in a cosine potential perturbed by an external time-dependent force. For our choice of initial condition and with $\hbar$ small but finite, we find that the wave packet behaves classically (meaning that the quantum behavior is indistinguishable from that of the analogous classical system) as long as the motion is confined to the interior of the remnant separatrix of the cosine potential. Once the classical motion becomes unbounded, however, we find that quantum interference effects dominate. This interference leads to a long-lived accumulation of quantum amplitude on top of the cosine barrier. This pinning of the amplitude on the barrier is a dynamic mechanism for the quantum inhibition of classical mixing.Comment: 20 pages, RevTeX format with 6 Postscript figures appended in uuencoded tar.Z forma

Decoherence, Chaos, and the Correspondence Principle

We present evidence that decoherence can produce a smooth quantum-to-classical transition in nonlinear dynamical systems. High-resolution tracking of quantum and classical evolutions reveals differences in expectation values of corresponding observables. Solutions of master equations demonstrate that decoherence destroys quantum interference in Wigner distributions and washes out fine structure in classical distributions bringing the two closer together. Correspondence between quantum and classical expectation values is also re-established.Comment: 4 pages, 2 figures (color figures embedded at low resolution), uses RevTeX plus macro (included). Phys. Rev. Lett. (in press