Quantum chaotic environments, the butterfly effect, and decoherence

Phys Rev Lett. 2002 Oct 21;89(17):170405. doi: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.89.170405. Epub 2002 Oct 8.

Abstract

We investigate the sensitivity of quantum systems that are chaotic in a classical limit to small perturbations of their equations of motion. This sensitivity, originally studied in the context of defining quantum chaos, is relevant to decoherence when the environment has a chaotic classical counterpart.