No Arabic abstract
We study the quantum to classical transition in a chaotic system surrounded by a diffusive environment. The emergence of classicality is monitored by the Renyi entropy, a measure of the entanglement of a system with its environment. We show that the Renyi entropy has a transition from quantum to classical behavior that scales with $hbar^2_{rm eff}/D$, where $hbar_{rm eff}$ is the effective Planck constant and $D$ is the strength of the noise. However, it was recently shown that a different scaling law controls the quantum to classical transition when it is measured comparing the corresponding phase space distributions. We discuss here the meaning of both scalings in the precise definition of a frontier between the classical and quantum behavior. We also show that there are quantum coherences that the Renyi entropy is unable to detect which questions its use in the studies of decoherence.
The work distribution is a fundamental quantity in nonequilibrium thermodynamics mainly due to its connection with fluctuations theorems. Here we develop a semiclassical approximation to the work distribution for a quench process in chaotic systems. The approach is based on the dephasing representation of the quantum Loschmidt echo and on the quantum ergodic conjecture, which states that the Wigner function of a typical eigenstate of a classically chaotic Hamiltonian is equidistributed on the energy shell. We show that our semiclassical approximation is accurate in describing the quantum distribution as we increase the temperature. Moreover, we also show that this semiclassical approximation provides a link between the quantum and classical work distributions.
We study the dynamical complexity of an open quantum driven double-well oscillator, mapping its dependence on effective Plancks constant $hbar_{eff}equivbeta$ and coupling to the environment, $Gamma$. We study this using stochastic Schrodinger equations, semiclassical equations, and the classical limit equation. We show that (i) the dynamical complexity initially increases with effective Hilbert space size (as $beta$ decreases) such that the most quantum systems are the least dynamically complex. (ii) If the classical limit is chaotic, that is the most dynamically complex (iii) if the classical limit is regular, there is always a quantum system more dynamically complex than the classical system. There are several parameter regimes where the quantum system is chaotic even though the classical limit is not. While some of the quantum chaotic attractors are of the same family as the classical limiting attractors, we also find a quantum attractor with no classical counterpart. These phenomena occur in experimentally accessible regimes.
We study how decoherence rules the quantum-classical transition of the Kicked Harmonic Oscillator (KHO). When the amplitude of the kick is changed the system presents a classical dynamics that range from regular to a strong chaotic behavior. We show that for regular and mixed classical dynamics, and in the presence of noise, the distance between the classical and the quantum phase space distributions is proportional to a single parameter $chiequiv Khbar_{rm eff}^2/4D^{3/2}$ which relates the effective Planck constant $hbar_{rm eff}$, the kick amplitude $K$ and the diffusion constant $D$. This is valid when $chi < 1$, a case that is always attainable in the semiclassical regime independently of the value of the strength of noise given by $D$. Our results extend a recent study performed in the chaotic regime.
Semiclassical methods can now explain many mesoscopic effects (shot-noise, conductance fluctuations, etc) in clean chaotic systems, such as chaotic quantum dots. In the deep classical limit (wavelength much less than system size) the Ehrenfest time (the time for a wavepacket to spread to a classical size) plays a crucial role, and random matrix theory (RMT) ceases to apply to the transport properties of open chaotic systems. Here we summarize some of our recent results for shot-noise (intrinsically quantum noise in the current through the system) in this deep classical limit. For systems with perfect coupling to the leads, we use a phase-space basis on the leads to show that the transmission eigenvalues are all 0 or 1 -- so transmission is noiseless [Whitney-Jacquod, Phys. Rev. Lett. 94, 116801 (2005), Jacquod-Whitney, Phys. Rev. B 73, 195115 (2006)]. For systems with tunnel-barriers on the leads we use trajectory-based semiclassics to extract universal (but non-RMT) shot-noise results for the classical regime [Whitney, Phys. Rev. B 75, 235404 (2007)].
In this paper we introduce a diagnostic for measuring the quantum-classical difference for open quantum systems, which is the normalized size of the quantum terms in the Master equation for Wigner function evolution. For a driven Duffing oscillator, this measure shows remarkably precise scaling over long time-scales with the parameter $zeta_0=hbar^2/D$. We also see that, independent of $zeta_0$ the dynamics follows a similar pattern. For small $zeta_0$ all of our curves collapses to essentially a single curve when scaled by the maximum value of the quantum-classical difference. In both limits of large and small $zeta_0$ we see a saturation effect in the size of the quantum-classical difference; that is, the instantaneous difference between quantum and classical evolutions cannot be either too small or too large.