Dissipative quantum chaos and decoherence (Q5926458)

The relation between quantum mechanics and classical mechanics is one of the intriguing and still open problem of modern physics. The systems whose classical behaviour is chaotic are of particular interest. An important aspect of the transition from quantum mechanics to classical mechanics is the interaction of a system with its environment. Such a coupling leads to the notions of dissipation and decoherence. The main subject of the book is the relations and connections of the quantum mechanics time evolution to the classical evolution for systems that are coupled to an environment. The systems with large quantum numbers are moustly dealt with in the book (semiclassical regime). There are seven chapters in the book. It starts with the concept of maps which arises in a natural way from periodically driven systems. Classical maps, Frobenius-Perron operators and quantum maps are considered in Chapters 2 and 3. The semiclassical propagator for a relaxation process is derived in Chapter 4. The derivation closely follows the original derivation in P. A. Braun, D. Braun and F. Haake (1998). Chapter 5 deals in detail with decoherence. Chapter 6 describes a dissipative kicked top which is a model system for the rest of the book. Most of the semiclassical results are contained in the long Chapter 7. Some of the topics considered are the following: the derivation of the trace formula, the extraction of the leading eigenvalues, the calculation of time-dependent observables and correlation functions. The book is sufficiently self-contained and is intended to a broad audience of physicists and mathematicians.