Driven Tunneling: Chaos and Decoherence

TL;DR

This paper explores how chaos influences quantum tunneling in a driven double-well system, examining both isolated and dissipative conditions, revealing complex quantum and classical behaviors near energy level crossings.

Contribution

It introduces a three-state model for chaos-assisted tunneling and analyzes the effects of dissipation on quantum dynamics and asymptotic states.

Findings

Three-state model describes coherent tunneling near energy crossings

Dissipation couples states to the environment, altering dynamics

Asymptotic quantum states show classical attractor features and quantum effects

Abstract

Chaotic tunneling in a driven double-well system is investigated in absence as well as in the presence of dissipation. As the constitutive mechanism of chaos-assisted tunneling, we focus on the dynamics in the vicinity of three-level crossings in the quasienergy spectrum. The coherent quantum dynamics near the crossing is described satisfactorily by a three-state model. It fails, however, for the corresponding dissipative dynamics, because incoherent transitions due to the interaction with the environment indirectly couple the three states in the crossing to the remaining quasienergy states. The asymptotic state of the driven dissipative quantum dynamics partially resembles the, possibly strange, attractor of the corresponding damped driven classical dynamics, but also exhibits characteristic quantum effects.