Lifetime of the arrow of time inherent in chaotic eigenstates: case of coupled kicked rotors

Abstract

A linear oscillator very weakly coupled with the object quantum system is proposed as a detector measuring the lifetime of irreversibility exhibited by the system, and classically chaotic coupled kicked rotors are examined as ideal examples. The lifetime increases drastically in close correlation with the enhancement of entanglement entropy(EE) between the kicked rotors. In the transition regime to the full entanglement, the EE of individual eigenstates fluctuates anomalously, and the lifetime also fluctuates in correlation with the EE. In the fully entangled regime the fluctuation disappear, but the lifetime is not yet unique but increases in proportion to the number of superposed eigenstates and is proportional to the square of Hilbert space dimension in the full superposition.