Superballistic wavepacket spreading in double kicked rotors

Abstract

We investigate possible ways in which a quantum wavepacket spreads. We show that in a general class of double kicked rotor systems, a wavepacket may undergo superballistic spreading; i.e., its variance increases as the cubic of time. The conditions for the observed superballistic spreading and two related characteristic time scales are studied. Our results suggest that the symmetry of the studied model and whether it is a Kolmogorov-Arnold-Moser system are crucial to its wavepacket spreading behavior. Our study also sheds new light on the exponential wavepacket spreading phenomenon previously observed in the double kicked rotor systems.