Lyapunov Decoherence Rate in Classically Chaotic Systems

Understand

We provide a path integral treatment of the decoherence process induced by a heat bath on a single particle whose dynamics is classically chaotic and show that the decoherence rate is given by the Lyapunov exponent.

• The loss of coherence is charaterized by the purity, which is calculated semiclassically within diagonal approximation, when the particle initial state is a single gaussian wave packet.
• The calculation is performed for weak dissipation and in the high temperature limit.
• This situation allows us to simplify the heat bath description to a single random potential.