An initial local excitation in a confined quantum system evolves exploring
the whole system, returning to the initial position as a mesoscopic echo at the
Heisenberg time. We consider a two weakly coupled spin chains, a spin ladder,
where one is a quantum channel while the other represents an environment. We
quantify decoherence in the quantum channel through the attenuation of the
mesoscopic echoes. We evaluate decoherence rates for different ratios between
sources of amplitude fluctuation and dephasing in the inter-chain interaction
Hamiltonian. The many-body dynamics is seen as a one-body evolution with a
decoherence rate given by the Fermi golden rule.Comment: 12 pages, 7 figure
