We treat the double well quantum oscillator from the standpoint of the Ehrenfest equation but in a manner different from Pattanayak and Schieve. We show that for short times there can be chaotic motion due to quantum fluctuations, but over sufficiently long times the behaviour is normal.
We consider an Ehrenfest approximation for a particle in a double-well potential in the presence of an external environment schematized as a finite resource heat bath. This allows us to explore how the limitations in the applicability of Ehrenfest dynamics to nonlinear systems are modified in an open system setting. Within this framework, we have identified an environment-induced spontaneous symmetry breaking mechanism, and we argue that the Ehrenfest approximation becomes increasingly valid in the limit of strong coupling to the external reservoir, either in the form of increasing number of oscillators or increasing temperature. The analysis also suggests a rather intuitive picture for the general phenomenon of quantum tunneling and its interplay with classical thermal activation processes, which may be of relevance in physical chemistry, ultracold atom physics, and fast-switching dynamics such as in superconducting digital electronics.
We propose an anharmonic oscillator driven by two periodic forces of different frequencies as a new time-dependent model for investigating quantum dissipative chaos. Our analysis is done in the frame of statistical ensemble of quantum trajectories in quantum state diffusion approach. Quantum dynamical manifestation of chaotic behavior, including the emergence of chaos, properties of strange attractors, and quantum entanglement are studied by numerical simulation of ensemble averaged Wigner function and von Neumann entropy.
We study the quantum dissipative Duffing oscillator across a range of system sizes and environmental couplings under varying semiclassical approximations. Using spatial (based on Kullback-Leibler distances between phase-space attractors) and temporal (Lyapunov exponent-based) complexity metrics, we isolate the effect of the environment on quantum-classical differences. Moreover, we quantify the system sizes where quantum dynamics cannot be simulated using semiclassical or noise-added classical approximations. Remarkably, we find that a parametrically invariant meta-attractor emerges at a specific length scale and noise-added classical models deviate strongly from quantum dynamics below this scale. Our findings also generalize the previous surprising result that classically regular orbits can have the greatest quantum-classical differences in the semiclassical regime. In particular, we show that the dynamical growth of quantum-classical differences is not determined by the degree of classical chaos.
We return to the description of the damped harmonic oscillator by means of a closed quantum theory with a general assessment of previous works, in particular the Bateman-Caldirola-Kanai model and a new model recently proposed by one of the authors. We show the local equivalence between the two models and argue that latter has better high energy behavior and is naturally connected to existing open-quantum-systems approaches.
We demonstrate that an ultracold many-body bosonic ensemble confined in a one-dimensional (1D) double-well (DW) potential can exhibit chaotic dynamics due to the presence of a single impurity. The non-equilibrium dynamics is triggered by a quench of the impurity-Bose interaction and is illustrated via the evolution of the population imbalance for the bosons between the two wells. While the increase of the post-quench interaction strength always facilitates the irregular motion for the bosonic population imbalance, it becomes regular again when the impurity is initially populated in the highly excited states. Such an integrability to chaos (ITC) transition is fully captured by the transient dynamics of the corresponding linear entanglement entropy, whose infinite-time averaged value additionally characterizes the edge of the chaos and implies the existence of an effective Bose-Bose attraction induced by the impurity. In order to elucidate the physical origin for the observed ITC transition, we perform a detailed spectral analysis for the mixture with respect to both the energy spectrum as well as the eigenstates. Specifically, two distinguished spectral behaviors upon a variation of the interspecies interaction strength are observed. While the avoided level-crossings take place in the low-energy spectrum, the energy levels in the high-energy spectrum possess a band-like structure and are equidistant within each band. This leads to a significant delocalization of the low-lying eigenvectors which, in turn, accounts for the chaotic nature of the bosonic dynamics. By contrast, those highly excited states bear a high resemblance to the non-interacting integrable basis, which explains for the recovery of the integrability for the bosonic species. Finally, we discuss the induced Bose-Bose attraction as well as its impact on the bosonic dynamics.