Decoherence from a chaotic environment: An upside-down “oscillator” as a model

Chaotic evolutions exhibit exponential sensitivity to initial conditions. This suggests that even very small perturbations resulting from weak coupling of a quantum chaotic environment to the position of a system whose state is a nonlocal superposition will lead to rapid decoherence. However, it is also known that quantum counterparts of classically chaotic systems lose exponential sensitivity to initial conditions, so this expectation of enhanced decoherence is by no means obvious. We analyze decoherence due to a “toy” quantum environment that is analytically solvable, yet displays the crucial phenomenon of exponential sensitivity to perturbations. We show that such an environment, with a single degree of freedom, can be far more effective at destroying quantum coherence than a heat bath with infinitely many degrees of freedom. This also means that the standard “quantum Brownian motion” model for a decohering environment may not be as universally applicable as it once was conjectured to be.