Displacement Echoes: Classical Decay and Quantum Freeze

Cyril Petitjean, Diego V. Bevilaqua, Eric J. Heller, and Philippe Jacquod
Phys. Rev. Lett. 98, 164101 – Published 18 April 2007

Abstract

Motivated by neutron scattering experiments, we investigate the decay of the fidelity with which a wave packet is reconstructed by a perfect time-reversal operation performed after a phase-space displacement. In the semiclassical limit, we show that the decay rate is generically given by the Lyapunov exponent of the classical dynamics. For small displacements, we additionally show that, following a short-time Lyapunov decay, the decay freezes well above the ergodic value because of quantum effects. Our analytical results are corroborated by numerical simulations.

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  • Received 30 November 2006

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.98.164101

©2007 American Physical Society

Authors & Affiliations

Cyril Petitjean1, Diego V. Bevilaqua2, Eric J. Heller2,3, and Philippe Jacquod4

  • 1Département de Physique Théorique, Université de Genève, CH-1211 Genève 4, Switzerland
  • 2Department of Physics, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138, USA
  • 3Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138, USA
  • 4Physics Department, University of Arizona, Tucson, Arizona 85721, USA

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Issue

Vol. 98, Iss. 16 — 20 April 2007

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