Recent work has connected the type of fidelity decay in perturbed quantum
models to the presence of chaos in the associated classical models. We
demonstrate that a system's rate of fidelity decay under repeated perturbations
may be measured efficiently on a quantum information processor, and analyze the
conditions under which this indicator is a reliable probe of quantum chaos and
related statistical properties of the unperturbed system. The type and rate of
the decay are not dependent on the eigenvalue statistics of the unperturbed
system, but depend on the system's eigenvector statistics in the eigenbasis of
the perturbation operator. For random eigenvector statistics the decay is
exponential with a rate fixed precisely by the variance of the perturbation's
energy spectrum. Hence, even classically regular models can exhibit an
exponential fidelity decay under generic quantum perturbations. These results
clarify which perturbations can distinguish classically regular and chaotic
quantum systems.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figures, LaTeX; published version (revised introduction
and discussion