Quantum freeze of fidelity decay for a class of integrable dynamics

Abstract

We discuss quantum fidelity decay of classically regular dynamics, in particular for an important special case of a vanishing time averaged perturbation operator, i.e. vanishing expectation values of the perturbation in the eigenbasis of unperturbed dynamics. A complete semiclassical picture of this situation is derived in which we show that the quantum fidelity of individual coherent initial states exhibits three different regimes in time: (i) first it follows the corresponding classical fidelity up to time t1=hbar^(-1/2), (ii) then it freezes on a plateau of constant value, (iii) and after a time scale t_2=min[hbar^(1/2) delta^(-2),hbar^(-1/2) delta^(-1)] it exhibits fast ballistic decay as exp(-const. delta^4 t^2/hbar) where delta is a strength of perturbation. All the constants are computed in terms of classical dynamics for sufficiently small effective value hbar of the Planck constant. A similar picture is worked out also for general initial states, and specifically for random initial states, where t_1=1, and t_2=delta^(-1). This prolonged stability of quantum dynamics in the case of a vanishing time averaged perturbation could prove to be useful in designing quantum devices. Theoretical results are verified by numerical experiments on the quantized integrable top.

32 pages, 8 figures (1 color); minor typos corrected, published version; see also movies at http://chaos.fiz.uni-lj.si/papers/freeze