Driven chaotic systems are of interest in mesoscopic physics, as well as in nuclear, atomic and molecular physics. Such systems [coordinates $(Q,P)$]$ tend to absorb energy. This irreversible effect is known as dissipation. "Driving" means that a parameter $x$ is changed in time. More generally, $x$ may be a dynamical variable. In such case the interaction of $(x,p)$ with the environmental degrees of freedom $(Q,P)$ leads to dephasing as well as to dissipation. We introduce a general framework for the analysis of dissipation and dephasing, and we clarify the tight connection to recent studies of quantum irreversibility (also referred to as "Loschmidt echo" or as the "fidelity" of quantum computation). Specific model systems that will be presented are: particle in a box driven by moving a wall, and particle in a box/ring driven by electro-motive-force. These two examples are related to studies of nuclear friction and mesoscopic conductance.
We first present a summary of recent results concerning the phononic energy transport properties of mesoscopic, suspended dielectric wires. We then discuss some related open problems concerning the fundamental lower limits on the vibrational damping rates of submicron-sized cantilever structures and also the possibility to create and detect quantum superpositions of spatially separated states for such structures.
An initial local excitation in a confined quantum system evolves exploring the whole system, returning to the initial position as a mesoscopic echo at the Heisenberg time. We consider a two weakly coupled spin chains, a spin ladder, where one is a quantum channel while the other represents an environment. We quantify decoherence in the quantum channel through the attenuation of the mesoscopic echoes. We evaluate decoherence rates for different ratios between sources of amplitude fluctuation and dephasing in the inter-chain interaction Hamiltonian. The many-body dynamics is seen as a one-body e…
Two initially correlated coherent states, each interacting with its own independent dissipative environment exhibit a sudden transition from classical to quantum decoherence. This change in the dynamics is a turning point in the decoherence, in the sense that depending on the average number of photons of each cavity, decoherence can even be suppressed. Indeed, the quantum state is time-independent for a time span in the mesoscopic regime, revealing a decoherence-free subspace. Furthermore, the absence of decoherence is manifested in the apparition of a metastable pointer state basis.
We extend the recent gravitational decoherence analysis of Pikovski et al. to an individual mesoscopic system with internal state characterized by a coherent superposition of energy eigenstates. We express the Pikovski et al. effect directly in terms of the energy variance, and show that the interferometric visibility is bounded from below. Hence unlike collisional decoherence, the visibility does not approach zero at large times, although for a large system it can become very small.
The coupling of a mesoscopic system with its environment usually causes total decoherence: at long times the reduced density matrix of the system evolves in time to a limit which is independent of its initial value, losing all the quantum information stored in its initial state. Under special circumstances, a subspace of the system's Hilbert space remains coherent, or "decoherence free", and the reduced density matrix approaches a non-trivial limit which contains information on its initial quantum state, despite the coupling to the environment. This situation is called "partial decoherence". H…
The decay of the overlap between a wave packet evolved with a Hamiltonian H and the same state evolved with H}+$Σ$ serves as a measure of the decoherence time $τ_ϕ$. Recent experimental and analytical evidence on classically chaotic systems suggest that, under certain conditions, $τ_ϕ$ depends on H but not on $Σ$. By solving numerically a Hamiltonian model we find evidence of that property provided that the system shows a Wigner-Dyson spectrum (which defines quantum chaos) and the perturbation exceeds a crytical value defined by the parametric correlations of the spectra.
We report the realization of an entangled quantum superposition of M=12 photons by a high gain, quantum-injected optical parametric amplification. The system is found so highly resilient against decoherence to exhibit directly accessible mesoscopic interference effects at normal temperature. By modern tomographic methods the non-separability and the quantum superposition are demonstrated for the overall mesoscopic output state of the dynamic ''closed system''. The device realizes the condition conceived by Erwin Schroedinger with his 1935 paradigmatic ''Cat'' apologue, a fundamental landmark i…
A three-site mesoscopic ring provides an ideal setting for an exact calculation of the bond current when the ring is threaded by an Aharonov-Bohm flux. The bond current is a measurable outcome of the coherent properties of the quantum phase. However the coherence is impeded by noise when the ring is put in contact with an environment. This coherence-to-incoherence transition is analyzed in detail here for both classical (Gaussian and telegraphic) and quantum noise and a comparative assessment is made when the quantum noise is governed by a spin-boson Hamiltonian of dissipative quantum mechanic…
We investigate the behavior of N atoms resonantly coupled to a single electromagnetic field mode sustained by a high quality cavity, containing a mesoscopic coherent field. We show with a simple effective hamiltonian model that the strong coupling between the cavity and the atoms produces an atom-field entangled state, involving N+1 nearly-coherent components slowly rotating at different paces in the phase plane. The periodic overlap of these components results in a complex collapse and revival pattern for the Rabi oscillation. We study the influence of decoherence due to the finite cavity qua…
We study theoretically the interaction-induced generation of mesoscopic coherent spin state superpositions (small cat states) from an initial coherent spin state in bimodal Bose-Einstein condensates and the subsequent phase revival, including decoherence due to particle losses and fluctuations of the total particle number. In a full multimode description, we propose a preparation procedure of the initial coherent spin state and we study the effect of preexisting thermal fluctuations on the phase revival, and on the spin and orbito-spinorial cat fidelities.
We consider the conductance distributions in chaotic mesoscopic cavities for all three invariant classes of random matrices for the arbitrary number of channels N1, N2 in the connecting leads. We show that the Laplace transforms of the distributions can be expressed in terms of determinants in the unitary case and Pfaffians in the orthogonal and symplectic cases. The inverse Laplace transforms then give the exact distributions. This formalism is particularly useful for small values of N = min (N1, N2), and thus is of direct experimental relevance. We also obtain the conductance distributions f…
We consider a mesoscopic measuring device whose conductance is sensitive to the state of a two-level system. The detector is described with the help of its scattering matrix. Its elements can be used to calculate the relaxation and decoherence time of the system, and determine the characteristic time for a reliable measurement. We derive conditions needed for an efficient ratio of decoherence and measurement time. To illustrate the theory we discuss the distribution function of the efficiency of an ensemble of open chaotic cavities.
We provide a path integral treatment of the decoherence process induced by a heat bath on a single particle whose dynamics is classically chaotic and show that the decoherence rate is given by the Lyapunov exponent. The loss of coherence is charaterized by the purity, which is calculated semiclassically within diagonal approximation, when the particle initial state is a single gaussian wave packet. The calculation is performed for weak dissipation and in the high temperature limit. This situation allows us to simplify the heat bath description to a single random potential. Although the dissipa…
We discuss recent experimental evidence of decoherence in a laboratory mesoscopic system in a cavity, from which we draw analogies with the decoherence that we argue is induced by microscopic quantum-gravity fluctuations in the space-time background. We emphasize the parallel rôles played in both cases by dissipation through non-trivial vacuum fluctuations that trigger the collapse of an initially coherent quantum state. We review a phenomenological parametrization of possible effects of this kind in the neutral kaon system, where they would induce CPT violation, and describe some epxerimental…
Recently, several proposals have been made to test the quantum superposition principle in the mesoscopic regime. Most of these tests consist of a careful measurement of the loss of interference due to decoherence. Here we consider, instead, the spread in position of a freely falling nanosphere. We study in depth the dependence of this spread on self-gravity in the presence of decoherence (exotic and non-exotic). We show that the influence of self-gravity is robust in the presence of weak decoherence, and quantify this robustness by introducing a new parameter, the critical decoherence, aimed a…
We show that two-atom correlation measurements of the type involved in a recent experimental study of the evolution of a mesoscopic superposition state prepared in a definite mode of a high-Q cavity can be used to determine the eigenvalues of the reduced density matrix of the field, provided the assumed dynamical conditions are actually fulfilled to experimental accuracy. These conditions involve i) a purely dispersive coupling of the field to the Rydberg atoms used to manipulate and to monitor the cavity field, and ii) the effective absence of correlations in the ground state of the system co…
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 in situations when the environment has a chaotic classical counterpart.
Understanding and mitigating decoherence is a key challenge for quantum science and technology. The main source of decoherence for solid-state spin systems is the uncontrolled spin bath environment. Here, we demonstrate quantum control of a mesoscopic spin bath in diamond at room temperature that is composed of electron spins of substitutional nitrogen impurities. The resulting spin bath dynamics are probed using a single nitrogen-vacancy (NV) centre electron spin as a magnetic field sensor. We exploit the spin bath control to dynamically suppress dephasing of the NV spin by the spin bath. Fur…
We investigate decoherence in quantum systems coupled via dephasing-type interactions to an arbitrary environment with chaotic underlying classical dynamics. The coherences of the reduced state of the central system written in the preferential energy eigenbasis are quantum Loschmidt echoes, which in the strong coupling regime are characterized at long times scales by fluctuations around a constant mean value. We show that due to the chaotic dynamics of the environment, the mean value and the width of the Loschmidt echo fluctuations are inversely proportional to the quantity we define as the ef…
We numerically investigate decoherence of a two-spin system (central system) by a bath of many spins 1/2. By carefully adjusting parameters, the dynamical regime of the bath has been varied from quantum chaos to regular, while all other dynamical characteristics have been kept practically intact. We explicitly demonstrate that for a many-body quantum bath, the onset of quantum chaos leads to significantly faster and stronger decoherence compared to an equivalent non-chaotic bath. Moreover, the non-diagonal elements of the system's density matrix decay differently for chaotic and non-chaotic ba…
We study the decoherence of a one-particle system, whose classical correpondent is chaotic, when it evolves coupled to a weak quenched environment. This is done by analytical evaluation of the Loschmidt Echo, (i.e. the revival of a localized density excitation upon reversal of its time evolution), in presence of the perturbation. We predict an exponential decay for the Loschmidt Echo with a (decoherence) rate which is asymptotically given by the mean Lyapunov exponent of the classical system, and therefore independent of the perturbation strength, within a given range of strengths. Our results…
In order to analyze the effect of chaos or order on the rate of decoherence in a subsystem we aim to distinguish effects of the two types of dynamics from those depending on the choice of the wave packet. To isolate the former we introduce a random matrix model that permits to vary the coupling strength between the subsystems. The case of strong coupling is analyzed in detail, and we find at intermediate times a weak effect of spectral correlations that is reminiscent of the correlation hole.
Quantum decoherence is of primary importance for relaxation to an equilibrium distribution and, accordingly, for equilibrium processes. We demonstrate how coherence breaking implies evolution to a microcanonical distribution (``microcanonical postulate'') and, on that ground, consider an adiabatic process, in which there is no thermostat. We stress its difference from a zero-polytropic process, i.e., a process with zero heat capacity but involving a thermostat. We find the distribution for the adiabatic process and show that (i) in the classical limit this distribution is canonical, (ii) for m…
I consider the interaction of a superposition of mesoscopic coherent states and its approach to a mixed state as a result of a suitably controlled environment. I show how the presence of a gain medium in a cavity can lead to diagonalization in coherent state basis in contrast to the standard model of decoherence. I further show how the new model of decoherence can lead to the generation of $s$ ordered quasi distributions.
The effect of chaotic bath dynamics on the decoherence of a quantum system is examined for the vibrational degrees of freedom of a diatomic molecule in a realistic, constant temperature collisional bath. As an example, the specific case of I$_2$ in liquid xenon is examined as a function of temperature, and the results compared with an integrable xenon bath. A crossover in behavior is found: the integrable bath induces more decoherence at low bath temperatures than does the chaotic bath, whereas the opposite is the case at the higher bath temperatures. These results, verifying a conjecture due …
We address frequency-dependent quantum transport through mesoscopic conductors in the semiclassical limit. By generalizing the trajectory-based semiclassical theory of dc quantum transport to the ac case, we derive the average screened conductance as well as ac weak-localization corrections for chaotic conductors. Thereby we confirm respective random matrix results and generalize them by accounting for Ehrenfest time effects. We consider the case of a cavity connected through many leads to a macroscopic circuit which contains ac-sources. In addition to the reservoir the cavity itself is capaci…
Control of electron spin decoherence in contact with a mesoscopic bath of many interacting nuclear spins in an InAs quantum dot is studied by solving the coupled quantum dynamics. The nuclear spin bath, because of its bifurcated evolution predicated on the electron spin up or down state, measures the which-state information of the electron spin and hence diminishes its coherence. The many-body dynamics of nuclear spin bath is solved with a pair-correlation approximation. In the relevant timescale, nuclear pair-wise flip-flops, as elementary excitations in the mesoscopic bath, can be mapped int…
Violation of correspondence principle may occur for very macroscopic byt isolated quantum systems on rather short timescales as illustrated by the case of Hyperion, the chaotically tumbling moon of Saturn, for which quantum and classical predictions are expected to diverge on a timescale of approximately 20 years. Motivated by Hyperion, we review salient features of ``quantum chaos'' and show that decoherence is the essential ingredient of the classical limit, as it enables one to solve the apparent paradox caused by the breakdown of the correspondence principle for classically chaotic systems…
The famous Nils Bohr's quantum-classical correspondence principle states that the classical mechanics is a limiting case of the more general quantum mechanics. This implies that ``under certain conditions" quantum laws of motion become equivalent to classical laws. One of the conditions is fairly obvious: the corresponding classical action should be very large as compared with the Planck's constant. But this condition is not sufficient. Suppression of effects of quantum interference ("decoherence") is the phenomenon of primary importance for understanding of the Bohr's principle. Being, in ess…
Decoherence in quantum systems which are classically chaotic is studied. The Arnold cat map and the quantum kicked rotor are chosen as examples of linear and nonlinear chaotic systems. The Feynman-Vernon influence functional formalism is used to study the effect of the environment on the system. It is well-known that quantum coherence can obliterate many chaotic behavior in the corresponding classical system. But interaction with an environment can under general circumstances quickly diminish quantum coherence and reenact many classical chaotic behavior. How effective decoherence works to sust…
The interplay between single-particle interference and quantum indistinguishability leads to signature correlations in many-body scattering. We uncover these with a semiclassical calculation of the transmission probabilities through mesoscopic cavities for systems of non-interacting particles. For chaotic cavities we provide the universal form of the first two moments of the transmission probabilities over ensembles of random unitary matrices, including weak localization and dephasing effects. If the incoming many-body state consists of two macroscopically occupied wavepackets, their time dela…
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 non-local 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 cruci…
A mesoscopic evolution equation for an ensemble of mesoparticles follows after the elimination of internal degrees of freedom. If the system is composed of a hierarchy of scales, the reduction procedure could be worked repeatedly and the characterization of this iterating method is carried out. Namely, a prescription describing a discrete hierarchy of master equations for the density operator is obtained. Decoherence follows from the irreversible coupling of the systems, defined by mesoscopic variables, to internal degrees of freedom. We discuss briefly the existence of systems with the same d…
We study the differences between the process of decoherence induced by chaotic and regular environments. For this we analyze a family of simple models wich contain both regular and chaotic environments. In all cases the system of interest is a "quantum walker", i.e. a quantum particle that can move on a lattice with a finite number of sites. The walker interacts with an environment wich has a D dimensional Hilbert space. The results we obtain suggest that regular and chaotic environments are not distinguishable from each other in a (short) timescale t*, wich scales with the dimensionality of t…
We show that for an open quantum system which is classically chaotic (a quartic double well with harmonic driving coupled to a sea of harmonic oscillators) the rate of entropy production has, as a function of time, two relevant regimes: For short times it is proportional to the diffusion coefficient (fixed by the system--environment coupling strength). For longer times (but before equilibration) there is a regime where the entropy production rate is fixed by the Lyapunov exponent. The nature of the transition time between both regimes is investigated.
We study the decoherence process for an open quantum system which is classically chaotic (a quartic double well with harmonic driving coupled to a sea of harmonic oscillators). We analyze the time dependence of the rate of entropy production showing that it has two relevant regimes: For short times it is proportional to the diffusion coefficient (fixed by the system--environment coupling strength). For longer times (but before equilibration) it is fixed by dynamical properties of the system (and is related to the Lyapunov exponent). The nature of the transition time between both regimes is inv…
The Loschmidt echo (LE) is a measure of the sensitivity of quantum mechanics to perturbations in the evolution operator. It is defined as the overlap of two wave functions evolved from the same initial state but with slightly different Hamiltonians. Thus, it also serves as a quantification of irreversibility in quantum mechanics. In this thesis the LE is studied in systems that have a classical counterpart with dynamical instability, that is, classically chaotic. An analytical treatment that makes use of the semiclassical approximation is presented. It is shown that, under certain regime of th…
We study the dynamics of a quantum spin ensemble controlled by trains of ultrashort pulses. To model disturbances of the kicks, we consider that the spins are submitted to different kick trains which follow regular, random, stochastic or chaotic dynamical processes. These are described by dynamical systems on a torus. We study the quantum decoherence and the population relaxation of the spin ensemble induced by these classical dynamical processes disturbing the kick trains. For chaotic kick trains we show that the decoherence and the relaxation processes exhibit a signature of chaos directly r…
We study the behavior of an open quantum system, with an $N$--dimensional space of states, whose density matrix evolves according to a non--unitary map defined in two steps: A unitary step, where the system evolves with an evolution operator obtained by quantizing a classically chaotic map (baker's and Harper's map are the two examples we consider). A non--unitary step where the evolution operator for the density matrix mimics the effect of diffusion in the semiclassical (large $N$) limit. The process of decoherence and the transition from quantum to classical behavior are analyzed in detail b…
We analyze the double slit interference of a mesoscopic particle. We calculate the visibility of the interference pattern, introduce a characteristic temperature that defines the onset to decoherence and scrutinize the conditions that must be satisfied for an interference experiment to be possible.
We show that some classically chaotic quantum systems uncoupled from noisy environments may generate intrinsic decoherence with all its associated effects. In particular, we have observed time irreversibility and high sensitivity to small perturbations in the initial conditions in a quasiperiodic version of the kicked rotor. The existence of simple quantum systems with intrinsic decoherence clarifies the quantum--classical correspondence in chaotic systems.
The decoherence of quantum states defines the transition between the quantum world and classical physics. Decoherence or, analogously, quantum mechanical collapse events pose fundamental questions regarding the interpretation of quantum mechanics and are technologically relevant because they limit the coherent information processing performed by quantum computers. We have discovered that the transition regime enables a novel type of matter transport. Applying this discovery, we present nanoscale devices in which decoherence, modeled by random quantum jumps, produces fundamentally novel phenome…
We study the effects of dissipation and decoherence induced on a harmonic oscillator by the coupling to a chaotic system with two degrees of freedom. Using the Feynman-Vernon approach and treating the chaotic system semiclassically we show that the effects of the low dimensional chaotic environment are in many ways similar to those produced by thermal baths. The classical correlation and response functions play important roles in both classical and quantum formulations. Our results are qualitatively similar to the high temperature regime of the Caldeira-Leggett model.
We present a strategy to engineer a simple cavity-QED two-bit universal quantum gate using mesoscopic distinct quantum superposition states. The dissipative effect on decoherence and amplitude damping of the quantum bits are analyzed and the critical parameters are presented.
We investigate flux qubits driven by a biharmonic magnetic signal, with a phase lag that acts as an effective time reversal broken parameter. The driving induced transition rate between the ground and the excited state of the flux qubit can be thought as an effective transmitance, profiting from a direct analogy between interference effects at avoided level crossings and scattering events in disordered electronic systems. For time scales prior to full relaxation but large compared to the decoherence time, this characteristic rate has been accessed experimentally and its sensitivity with both t…
We show that the three-junction SQUID device designed for the Josephson flux qubit can be used to study quantum chaos when operated at high energies. In the parameter region where the system is classically chaotic we analyze the spectral statistics. The nearest neighbor distributions $P(s)$ are well fitted by the Berry Robnik theory employing as free parameters the pure classical measures of the chaotic and regular regions of phase space in the different energy regions. The phase space representation of the wave functions is obtained via the Husimi distributions and the localization of the sta…
We propose a strategy to suppress decoherence of a solid-state qubit coupled to non-Markovian noises by attaching the qubit to a chaotic setup with the broad power distribution in particular in the high-frequency domain. Different from the existing decoherence control methods such as the usual dynamics decoupling control, high-frequency components of our control are generated by the chaotic setup driven by a low-frequency field, and the generation of complex optimized control pulses is not necessary. We apply the scheme to superconducting quantum circuits and find that various noises in a wide…
The population decay due to a small opening in an otherwise closed cavity supporting chaotic classical dynamics displays a quantum correction on top of the classical exponential form, a pure manifestation of quantum coherence that acquires a universal form and can be explained by path interference. Being coherent, such enhancement is prone to decoherence effects due to the coupling of the system to an external environment. We study this interplay between incoherent and coherent quantum corrections to decay by evaluating, within a Caldeira-Legget scenario, off-diagonal contributions to the deco…
The following statements belonging to the folklore of the theory of environmental decoherence are shown to be incorrect: 1) linear coupling to harmonic oscillator bath is a universal model of decoherence, 2) chaotic environments are more efficient decoherers.
We show that, in presence of a complex spectrum, antiresonances act as a precursor for dephasing enabling the crossover to a fully decoherent transport even within a unitary Hamiltonian description. This general scenario is illustrated here by focusing on a quantum dot coupled to a chaotic cavity containing a finite, but large, number of states using a Hamiltonian formulation. For weak coupling to a chaotic cavity with a sufficiently dense spectrum, the ensuing complex structure of resonances and antiresonances leads to phase randomization under coarse graining in energy. Such phase instabilit…
We study the open system dynamics of a circuit QED model operating in the ultrastrong coupling regime. If the resonator is pumped periodically in time the underlying classical system is chaotic. Indeed, the periodically driven Jaynes-Cummings model in the Born-Oppenheimer approximation resembles a Duffing oscillator which in the classical limit is a well-known example of a chaotic system. Detection of the field quadrature of the output field acts as an effective position measurement of the oscillator. We address how such detection affects the quantum chaotic evolution in this bipartite system.…
Using recent results in the field of quantum chaos we derive explicit expressions for the time scale of decoherence induced by the system-environment entanglement. For a generic system-environment interaction and for a generic quantum chaotic system as environment, conditions are derived for energy eigenstates to be preferred states in the weak coupling regime. A simple model is introduced to numerically confirm our predictions. The results presented here may also help understanding the dynamics of quantum entanglement generation in chaotic quantum systems.
We carry out probabilistic phase-space sampling of mesoscopic Schrödinger cat quantum states, demonstrating multipartite Bell violations for up to 60 qubits. We use states similar to those generated in photonic and ion-trap experiments. These results show that mesoscopic quantum superpositions are directly accessible to probabilistic sampling, and we analyze the properties of sampling errors. We also demonstrate dynamical simulation of super-decoherence in ion traps. Our computer simulations can be either exponentially faster or slower than experiment, depending on the correlations measured.
Recent experimental results point to the existence of coherent quantum phenomena in systems made of a large number of particles, despite the fact that for many-body systems the presence of decoherence is hardly negligible and emerging classicality is expected. This behaviour hinges on collective observables, named quantum fluctuations, that retain a quantum character even in the thermodynamic limit: they provide useful tools for studying properties of many-body systems at the mesoscopic level, in between the quantum microscopic scale and the classical macroscopic one. We hereby present the gen…
Extensive coherent control over quantum chaotic diffusion using the kicked rotor model is demonstrated and its origin in deviations from random matrix theory is identified. Further, the extent of control in the presence of external decoherence is established. The results are relevant to both areas of quantum chaos and coherent control.
Quantum algorithmics with single spins poses serious technological challenges such as precision fabrication, rapid decoherence, atomic-scale addressing and readout. To circumvent atomic-scale challenges, we examine the case of fully polarized mesoscopic spin ensembles (spin-coherent states) whose total angular momenta states map to qudit submanifolds. We show that in the limit where the size of the ensembles is small compared to their separation, it is possible to treat them as qubits with an effective coupling strength that scales with the number of spins. If the spins within each ensemble ar…
We study the ultimate limits to the decoherence rate associated with dephasing processes. Fluctuating chaotic quantum systems are shown to exhibit extreme decoherence, with a rate that scales exponentially with the particle number, thus exceeding the polynomial dependence of systems with fluctuating $k$-body interactions. Our findings suggest the use of quantum chaotic systems as a natural test-bed for spontaneous wave function collapse models. We further discuss the implications on the decoherence of AdS/CFT black holes resulting from the unitarity loss associated with energy dephasing.
We study the decoherence of two coupled spins that interact with a chaotic spin-bath environment. It is shown that connectivity of spins in the bath is of crucial importance for the decoherence of the central system. The previously found phenomenon of two-step decoherence (Phys. Rev. Lett. {\bf 90}, 210401 (2003)) turns out to be typical for the bath with a slow enough dynamics or no dynamics. For a generic random system with chaotic dynamics a conventional exponential relaxation to the pointer states takes place. Our results confirm a conjecture of Paz and Zurek (Phys. Rev. Lett. {\bf 82}, 51…
