1303.3412 (David Viennot et al.)

Schrodinger's cat kicked by Arnold's cat: decoherence, relaxation and
chaos in a kicked spin bath    [PDF]

David Viennot, Lucile Aubourg

We study the dynamics of a quantum spin bath controlled by trains of ultrashort pulses. To model disturbances of the kicks, we consider that the spins are submitted to different kick trains which follow regular, random, stochastic or chaotic dynamical processes. These are described by dynamical systems on a torus. We study the quantum decoherence and the population relaxation of the spin bath induced by these classical dynamical processes disturbing the kick trains. For chaotic kick trains we show that the decoherence and the relaxation processes exhibit a signature of chaos directly related to the Lyapunov exponents of the dynamical system. This signature is a horizon of coherence, i.e. a preliminary duration without decoherence followed by a rapid decoherence process. The studied system is an efficient model to describe a quantum bath (the spin bath) in contact with a classical bath (the kick train bath).

View original: http://arxiv.org/abs/1303.3412